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July 1960: The newly independent Congo is hit by the secession of its mineral rich-province Katanga, led by Moïse Tshombe and backed by Belgium and Britain. June 1961: Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien arrives in Katanga as Special Representative of United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, his task (under a UN resolution) to arrest and repatriate the mercenaries and foreign interests propping up Tshombe. The consequences of this mission will prove fateful for all parties. This is the story of how a brilliant Irish diplomat found himself in Africa amid one of history's maelstroms. O'Brien reconstructs the complex, tragic, sometimes comic events of a drama in which he found himself controversially at centre stage. The result is history from the inside: a valuable study of'the game of nations', and of the UN's unique functioning and malfunctioning.

Conor Cruise O'Brien's brilliant and hugely controversial 1965 essay on the political convictions of W. B. Yeats is the title-piece for this superb 1988 collection of pieces on politics, religion, nationalism and terrorism.'O'Brien is a man of strong views, and he writes with verve and wit. Agree with him or not, one reads him with enjoyment.'Foreign Affairs'[Passion and Cunning] displays once again [O'Brien's] wonderful range of talents: a beautiful command of the language, gentle wit and coruscating satire, shrewd political judgment and a raking critical power. O'Brien is, moreover, a critic against all-comers, his spiky guns pointing in all directions: woe betide anyone incautious enough to presume that O'Brien is on their'side'... O'Brien believes in all manner of good causes, but his own independence is finally what he cares about most.'R. W. Johnson, London Review of Books

The first literary phase in the brilliant and protean career of Conor Cruise O'Brien was his work as critic for Dublin literary magazine The Bell, which begat this collection of essays first published in 1952 (under the pseudonym'Donat O'Donnell', as O'Brien was then a working civil servant.) In it, O'Brien set himself to a study of'the patterns of several exceptionally vivid imaginations which are permeated by Catholicism'- from Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh to Francois Mauriac and Paul Claudel - and to analyse'what those patterns might share'. The originality and flair of Maria Cross won O'Brien many vocal admirers, among them Dag Hammarskjold, cerebral Secretary-General of the United Nations.'A most interesting and at times brilliant book, admirably and wittily written.'New Statesman'One of the most acute and stimulating books of literary criticism to be published for some years.'Spectator

Arguably Conor Cruise O'Brien's most influential and admired book was this brilliant collection of essays - on history, literature and public affairs - first published in 1965.'I can still remember the excitement with which I discovered a copy of Writers and Politics, in a provincial library in Devonshire thirty years ago. Nobody who tries to write about either of those subjects, or about'the bloody crossroads'where they have so often met, can disown a debt to the Cruiser.'Christopher Hitchens, London Review of Books'When a liberal can write such pieces as'Mercy and Mercenaries','Journal de Combat','Varieties of Anti-Communism','A New Yorker Critic', and'Generation of Saints', an important voice has returned to our culture.'Raymond Williams,Guardian

In Herod: Reflections on Political Violence (first published in 1978) Conor Cruise O'Brien collects a number of essays alongside three short plays that dramatise political arguments through the infamous figure of the Roman king of Judaea for whom the collection is named.'A great book. In it, O'Brien not only denounces IRA terrorism, as you would expect from a mainstream politician, but - in a sense quite different from the rationalisations offered by ideological apologists for political violence - seeks to understand it. I mean, really understand it - not extenuate it by equivocation and non sequitur. And his thinking leads him to attack the republican mythology at the heart of the Irish state. Few writers have analysed terrorism so acutely or been as effective in undermining its ideological justifications.'Oliver Kamm, from his preface to this edition

Written in 1972 in the wake of Bloody Sunday and direct rule, States of Ireland was Conor Cruise O'Brien's searching analysis of contemporary Irish nationalism: part-memoir, part-history, part-polemic.'If The Great Melody (1992) is O'Brien's major academic work, States of Ireland is the one that will endure as a vital moment in Irish intellectual and political history.'Roy Foster, Standpoint'States of Ireland [is] a book which influenced a generation. [O'Brien] saw that partition, while scarcely desirable in itself, recognized the reality of two different communities in the island, and that the Dublin state's formal irredentist claim on Northern Ireland was undemocratic and even imperialistic, as well as insincere. The republican ideology to which most Irish people paid lip service was a shirt of Nessus, he later wrote:'it clings to us and burns'.'Geoffrey Wheatcroft,Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

The Suspecting Glance (first published in 1972) collects Conor Cruise O'Brien's four T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures as delivered at the University of Kent, Canterbury, in November 1969. The lectures were inspired by O'Brien's experience of holding the Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities at New York University from 1965-9, and there teaching students in whom he noted burning radical convictions but also a disconcerting'lack of suspicion in those bright, young eyes'. Whereas to O'Brien's mind the'suspecting glance'was a mark of political maturity that had to be first directed at one's own opinions prior to decrying another's. Brien's Eliot lectures were, as his friend Frank Callanan noted, a'corrective gesture'toward his New York experience. In them he considers four writers - Machiavelli, Burke, Nietzsche, Yeats - whom he reads as being'profoundly aware of the resource and versatility of violence and deception in man, in society, and in themselves'.

Essential reading for old fans and new admirers of Albert Camus'classic quarantine novel THE PLAGUE - a new bestseller amidst the coronavirus pandemic.'Brilliant.'The Times'Joyous... A unique critical talent.'TLS Albert Camus is one of the most famous French writers of the twentieth century, a Nobel Laureate celebrated for his classic existentialist novelThe Outsider and urgently relevant allegory of a pandemic, The Plague. But what about his controversial attitudes to race, especially his portrayal of Arabs versus Europeans, and French colonialism in Algeria? As provocative and brilliantly argued as it was in 1970, Conor Cruise O'Brien's Camus is a groundbreaking postcolonial critique which revolutionised how Camus was viewed by a new generation.

Just before he died after a long and distinguished international career as a politician, commentator, and author, Conor Cruise O'Brien completed a study of George Washington's presidency. Cruise O'Brien has been described as “a man who so persistently asks the right questions” (The Economist), and in this, his last book, he explores the question of how early America's future was determined.First in Peace considers the dissension between Washington and Jefferson during the first U.S. presidency, and reveals Washington's clear-sighted political wisdom while exposing Jefferson's dangerous ideology. Cruise O'Brien makes the case that Washington, not Jefferson, was the true democrat, and commends his clarity of vision in restoring good relations with Britain, his preference for order and pragmatism, and his aversion to French political extremism.