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In the second volume of The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (2006), edited by Margaret Kelleher and Philip O'Leary, the critic Colin Graham wrote as follows of a study of the poet Louis MacNeice that I published in Dublin in the mid-1970s:
By the time of Terence Brown's Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision in 1975, the sceptical-liberal version of MacNeice which Brown is interested in is entwined with MacNeice's often sardonic but affectionate relationship with Ireland. In reading MacNeice as something of a stranger in his own land, and as a man of personal and individualist integrity at a time of ideological extremity (in the 1930s in Britain), Brown claims a role for literary heritage in the maintenance of a neutral or, at least, a ‘sceptical’ vision when regarding the conflict in the North. Because it is one of the first substantial pieces of literary criticism in Ireland to undertake a rewriting of ‘Northern’ literature of the period immediately preceding the Troubles, Brown's book is absolutely crucial to the development of literary historiography from the 1970s on. Through its quiet polemic about the role of the writer (which effectively argues – by exemplary reading – that literature will always be political yet rise above dogma because it is literature), Brown's book marks out some of the key concepts by which both contemporary and past Irish writers are now understood.
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