Conor Cruise O’Brien is one of the most extraordinary personalities of the late twentieth century. Born in Ireland in 1917, he has been successively a civil servant, diplomat, U.N. official, academic administrator, member of the Irish parliament, Irish minister for posts and telegraphs, journalist, and author of a half-dozen first-rate books and several hundred articles, ranging from literary criticism to political philosophy and international affairs. Though well-grounded in Irish history and culture (unlike most of his countrymen, he is fully fluent in Gaelic), O’Brien has lived and worked in France, Britain, America, and Africa, and is a veteran of politics and the culture wars in each.

By the time O’Brien burst upon the American intellectual scene in the early 1960s he already had behind him a fairly extensive career in the Irish civil service and at the United Nations, and...

 

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