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'The breadth of Butler's interests and concerns is remarkable, even for a writer whose career spanned the greater part of a tumultuous century ...whether he is writing about wartime atrocities or local history, the slaughter of the Jews or Celtic hagiography, he speaks with authenticity. In this he is a member of a dying species.' John Banville 'Like Milosz from Poland or Holub from Czechoslovakia, Butler is a true cosmopolitan, and his writing has something of their unruffled astringency and meditative humour.' John Bayley 'An odyssey, from Ireland to East, West and back again: stemming from and returning to an intellectual tradition which takes in Montaigne and Turgenev as well as Swift and Shaw - It moves like a searchlight, to take in and illuminate the largest questions imaginable.' R.F. Foster 'To follow Hubert Butler is to enjoy the hair-raising frisson of history passing by.' Eoghan Harris

Hubert Butler won international recognition during his lifetime with the publication of three volumes of essays, Escape from the Anthill (1985), The Children of Drancy (1988) and Grandmother and Wolfe Tone (1990). John Banville's novels include The Book of Evidence, The Sea and The Infinities. He reviews frequently for the Irish Times, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books.