A memoir in which our hero blends autobiography with moral, political and cultural reflections. thoughts about god, evil, suffering, death and tragedy are interwoven with comic or moving scenes from the author's life; his bizarre experiences as a young altar server in a convent of enclosed nuns; his precarious career in 1960's cambridge as one of the few working-class students among a set of public school boys; his abortive experience of life in aseminary. Eagleton was brought up in Salford, Lancs., in a working-class University. 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.