An Irishman at heart

There You Are: Writings On Irish And American Literature And History, by Thomas Flanagan, New York, Review Books, €24.45.

Thomas Flanagan tells how he spent the summers of the 1970s writing The Year of the French, thereby “turning myself from a university professor into a novelist'‘. Two more novels followed, but only now, three years after his death in 2002, do we have a book testifying to Flanagan's immense gifts in that other ...