This memoir blends autobiography with moral, political and cultural reflections. Thoughts about god, evil, suffering, death and tragedy are interwoven with comic or moving scenes from Eagleton's life: his bizarre experiences as a young altar server in a convent of enclosed nuns; his precarious career in 1960s Cambridge as one of the few working-class students among a set of public school boys; and his abortive experience of life in a seminary. Eagleton was brought up in Salford in a working-class Catholic family and is now Thomas Warton Professor of English at the University of Oxford. His book discloses the more personal, spiritual side of a well-known cultural thinker; mixing the serious with the hilarious, life with ideas, the personal with the political.