Questioning Ireland is a lucky bag of commentary gathered from sources as varied as The Irish Times, the Dublin Review of Books, PN Review, a Cork City Planning Department Document and Facebook. Interrogating the legacies of Northern writers and the Southern ‘Ascendancy’ it attends to literary works as well as the visual arts with particular focus on figures from the author’s native Waterford and adopted Cork. A gathering of fifty years’ work, this copious collection of essays and reviews by the steadfast poet, novelist and diarist shows Thomas McCarthy to be a figure from a bygone era – a true man of letters.