The Gatekeeper: A Memoir by Terry Eagleton
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.