The Gatekeeper: A Memoir
Terry Eagleton's memoir traces his childhood in working-class Manchester and his passage through Irish Catholicism, grammar school, and Cambridge, pausing to sketch the priests, teachers, and dons who shaped him or supplied a contrast. The tone is Eagleton's own: satirical, tender, and unwilling to pretend that intellectual life is separate from class and flesh. He writes about shyness, asthma, ambition, and the comic inadequacy of institutions with the same energy he brings to literary theory. The book is short and sharp, a portrait of the critic as a young man with the politics still attached. Ideal reader: the reader who thinks memoir is best when it settles old scores affectionately, or the student wondering how a Manchester altar boy became a Marxist critic.
