Irish eyes aren’t smiling ALEX CLARK The Letters of John McGahern
Faber £30
John McGahern said letters are ‘never quite honest. Often out of sympathy or diffidence or kindness or affection or self-interest we quite rightly hide our true feelings.’
He was writing in 1991 to the critic Sophia Hillan, who had asked for permission to quote one of his letters in a monograph.
It’s impossible to work out whether his opinion of letters reflected general misgivings or a more specific anxiety –
