The Gatekeeper A Memoir

Often scathingly funny, frequently tender, and always completely engaging,The Gatekeeperis Terry Eagleton's memoirs, his deep-etched portraits of those who influenced him, either by example or by contrast: his father, headmasters, priests, and Cambridge dons. He was a shy, bookish, asthmatic boy keenly aware of social inferiority yet determined to make his intellectual way.The Gatekeepermixes the soberly serious with the downright hilarious, skewer-sharp satire with unashamed fondness, the personal with the political. Most of it all it reveals a young man learning to reconcile oppositions: a double-edged portrait of the intellectual as a young man.

Terry Eagleton has been Thomas Warton Professor of English at Oxford and a Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and is currently Professor of Cultural Theory at Manchester University.