Eagleton's a good critic with good politics, and I'm planning on reading his latest, too. His book attacking the "new atheism" was fantastic. Not only did it go after Dawkins, but the far cruder and all-round more loathsome Christopher Hitchens (about whom Richard Seymour's Unhitched is a much-needed polemic that is both worth reading and fun to read). Eagleton's main influences as a youth were Trotskyism and left-leaning Catholicism, coupled with his Irish background. He is a major intellectual.
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