Volume 56, Number 5 · March 26, 2009
Conor Cruise O'Brien, 1917–2008
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
One of the effects of great longevity is that even without ending as the proverbial forgotten man, someone may seem a relic from a very remote age. Most people reading this won't even have been born in 1946, when The Bell, a Dublin little magazine, published a clever, sharp essay titled 'The Pieties of Evelyn Waugh' (so clever that Waugh was moved to respond with an ingenious letter of his own, including the memorable line 'I think perhaps your reviewer is right in calling me a snob'), by an unknown writer called 'Donat O'Donell.' This was in fact the pen name adopted for literary moonlighting by Conor Cruise O'Brien when he was an official of the Dublin government. He was not quite thirty.
Feature, 3938 words
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