The author - a poet, critic and novelist - concerns himself not with theories of irony, but with its practice, as attack or defence, in both literature and life. He examines individual ironies, verbal and situational, and attempts to gauge their outcome in various spheres: religion, politics, censorship, love and death. He looks at irony as seen in Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust, James, Freud, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Conrad, Mann, Brecht and more recent writers. He discusses irony unrecognized and irony wrongly presumed. The study views irony as a style and as an approach to life and defends it as an often misunderstood attitude. Enright considers both the objections brought against irony and its role in humour.