In these brilliantly argued essays on Irish and English literature, Tom Paulin shows how writers react to political struggles and cultural upheaval - from Joyce in colonial Ireland and Auden in England in the Thirties to today's Belfast poet or Derry dramatist. The keynote of this controversial book is the phrase 'writing to the moment'. And like Samuel Richardson - whose motto this was - Tom Paulin is writing in the instant, about the present, and for the current age. Tom Paulin tackles the present crisis in English studies in a now notorious discussion of structuralism in education. This exemplary, incisive essay confronts critical fashions like deconstruction and exposes their destructive limitations. The book includes Paulin's famous polemic against Conor Cruise O'Brien, as well as his careful, rigorous account of Ian Paisley's writings and pronouncements. In these and in other essays he establishes a historical and cultural perspective, exploring first the Englishness of D.H. Lawrence, John le Carre and the expatriate Henry James, then the Anglo-Irishness of Oscar Wilde, William Trevor and Louis MacNeice. These forceful essays will contribute to a tradition of critical independence. They will combat what Tom Paulin calls the 'terminal self-disgust' with which much contemporary literary criticism is now afflicted.