The Gatekeeper

Often scathingly funny frequently tender and always completely engaging The Gatekeeper is Terry Eagleton''s memoirs his deep-etched portraits of those who influenced him either by example or by contrast: his father headmasters priests and Cambridge dons. He was a shy bookish asthmatic boy keenly aware of social inferiority yet determined to make his intellectual way. The Gatekeeper mixes the soberly serious with the downright hilarious skewer-sharp satire with unashamed fondness the personal with the political. Most of it all it reveals a young man learning to reconcile oppositions: a double-edged portrait of the intellectual as a young man.