Denis Donoghue is, for my money, the best kind of critic. One might apply to him the term “practical critic,” a label with strong appeal for people like me who read for pleasure and to learn. He is not the sort who bends his findings to suit some theory—Freudian, Structuralist, Deconstructionist, what have you. Edmund Wilson comes to mind as an ideal, but Donoghue does not rely as heavily on biography as did the sage of Hecate County. The late Frank Kermode hewed closer to Donoghue’s approach than anyone else I can think of. Donoghue is a curious and omnivorous enough reader to have familiarized himself with the latest trends in criticism, but he remains robustly self-reliant and skeptical even when invoking fellow critics whom he respects. The impetus behind the separate essays in Irish Essays, written to suit particular occasions, not as part of a coherent book, is nicely summarized by Michael Levenson, writing in The New York Times Book Review, when he comments that Donoghue’s literary journalism flourishes when “it lets itself submit to the occasions of the moment and the idiosyncrasies of publishing history, when it lets the editor be the muse, when it lets the request for an essay be the accident that stirs the pen.”

Donoghue’s near-encyclopedic frame of reference gives his discourse a bracing independence of mind that stops well short of a seen-it-all jadedness but at the same time lets us know we are listening to someone who brings to the