Collects essays by the Irish writer on such diverse topics as abortion, the liberation of Austrian Jews, Irish literature, and Yugoslavia

Independent Spirit: Essays

History

Butler, Hubert

Americas

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

The collected essays of the late Irish writer, who has belatedly been acclaimed as a rare European master. In these literary, personal and political pieces, most of which were originally published in small Irish newspapers, Butler treats topics from anti-fascism to the tone of Irish country life with uncommon elegance, power and range.

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

A selection of essays by Hubert Butler drawn from three volumes previously published.

The Sub-prefect Should Have Held His Tongue, and Other Essays

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Viking Adult

Escape from the Anthill

Craig, Maurice

The Lilliput Press

The children of Drancy

Reference

A third volume of essays - autobiographical, polemical, political, exploratory - by the most distinctive Irish writer of the age, in the highest tradition of Swift and Shaw. Hubert Butler's remarkable consistency of vision and clarity of mind make him unique among Irish essayists in reconciling diversity of content with unity of impression. The focus of his writing is local, its force and application universal. Like Chekhov, he is an abiding humanist whose work evinces an unsurpassed moral and spiritual integrity.

Grandmother And Wolf Tone

When it was first published in 1972, Hubert Butler's pioneering masterwork was received with skepticism by his contemporaries. He used linguistics to trace the origins of myths and saints back to pre-Celtic Ireland and Europe, and showed how these stories and names - ancestors of half-forgotten tribes - became absorbed by Christian mythology. This new edition, amplified and updated, demonstrates ingeniously coded histories - via place names, legends, hero-figures, saints, and ancestors - that relate to the wanderings and minglings of all the great tribes of Europe, extending back to Neolithic times.

Ten Thousand Saints: A Study in Irish and European Origins

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

'The Appleman and the Poet', the fifth volume of Hubert Butler's essays, completes a thirty-year odyssey embarked upon by The Lilliput Press in 1984. Our flagship author has finally come home, welcomed by Fintan O'Toole in his foreword: 'One of the great joys of these essays is the discovery of sentences as sharp and lithe as a Toledo rapier.'  Beginning with 'Russian Dispatches 1932 - 1946,' Butler gives an evocative description  -  from the viewpoint of a bourgeois teacher  -  of a society in dissolution, before the onset of Stalin's Great Purge, as show farms give way to show trials, the iron curtain descends across Europe, and Communism and Christianity lock horns. Part Two, 'Peace News Papers 1948 - 1958,' largely derives from the weekly Peace News, in which Butler debates and defends with steely precision Ireland's neutrality, pacifism, and the integrity of Yugoslavia, 'where we know that in 1941 and 1942 one very pious government [Croatia's] perpetrated the greatest massacre in the history of Christendom.'  'Autobiographies' contains some of Butler's most affecting work. It describes his parents and home at Maidenhall; details his education in England; reflects on a universal sexuality; has a poignant piece about deafness; and concludes with the Virgilian essay of the book's title. Part Four, 'Musings of an Irish Protestant,' expresses Butler's potent sense of an Anglo-Irish identity and community: from the 'right of private judgment' proclaimed at the 1782 Dungannon Convention, in a line of descent from Charlemont, Henry Grattan, Wolfe Tone and Emmet, via Thomas Davis, Standish O'Grady, Parnell and Arthur Griffith, to Yeats and the men of 1916  -  all independent spirits. 'Family Matters' addresses the Butler clan at home and abroad, with essays taken from the Journal of the Butler Society.  'History and Literature under Review' assembles newspaper and journal pieces on diverse subjects: Swift, Yeats, Horace Plunkett, Enid Starkie, Rebecca West (in Yugoslavia), the Holocaust, Early Irish saints, Hans Küng, Teilhard de Chardin, and Ronald Reagan and the American Wall of Separation (between Church and State) in the 1980s.  'The Appleman and the Poet' places a capstone upon a project begun with Escape from the Anthill in 1985. Butler's essays, written over six decades, establish him as one of Ireland's great twentieth- century prose writers and thinkers.

The Appleman and The Poet

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Butler, Hubert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Butler, Hubert

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Butler, Hubert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Independent Spirit: Essays

Independent Spirit: Essays

The Sub-prefect Should Have Held His Tongue, and Other Essays

Escape from the Anthill

The children of Drancy

Grandmother And Wolf Tone

Ten Thousand Saints: A Study in Irish and European Origins

The Appleman and The Poet