Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) is rightly regarded as one of the foremost Irish poets of this century, but he was also a distinctive, gifted, and popular playwright. This unique selection of eight of MacNeice's best-known plays, most of which were written for BBC Radio, draws on the most authoritative texts to provide a much-needed reminder of the power of his dramatic writing. All the plays are published here in authentic versions for the first time, several considerably changed, and two entirely new plays, never before published. The volume comprises MacNeice's famous The Dark Tower, published here for the first time in its third and final version; the saga play They Met on Good Friday and the parable The Mad Islands, both of which use explicitly Irish subject-matter; the stage play One for the Grave, which mercilessly satirizes television and commercialism; the epic Christopher Columbus; He Had a Date (in its second version), an experiment in radio biography; Prisoner's Progress, a prize-winning parable about an escape from a prisoner-of-war camp; and MacNeice's last play, Persons from Porlock, which traces the nemesis of an artist and was broadcast just four days before MacNeice's own death. This generous and representative selection makes available again MacNeice's entertaining and innovative Irish blend of fantasy and realism, prose and verse, and offers important new perspectives on MacNeice's poetry.

This is the second of two collections of MacNeice's prose writings, prepared by Alan Heuser. The first, concentrating on his literary criticism, came out in 1987 (still available from OUP). The present collection will be of interest to a wider readership, since it covers the sweep of MacNeice's many ardently-pursued interests outside the strictly literary: philosophy and travel, history, autobiography, Ireland (the country of his birth, and one of the mainsprings of his writing of both prose and poetry), India, Greece - and rugby football. The volume also contains the `London letters', written during the Blitz; and a previously unpublished piece: Northern Ireland and her People. These writings convey the visual perceptiveness, humour, seriousness, and enthusiasm of MacNeice's personality and poetry: they are more than simply reflections of the decades in which they were written (from the thirties to the early sixties), revealing MacNeice's particular gifts as a writer, and throwing light on his personality and preoccupations. The complete bibliography of the shorter prose, included in Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, is repeated here; and there is annotation and an index. This title also appears in the Oxford General Books catalogue for Autumn 1990.