Conor Cruise O'Brien is recognized internationally for having lived a series of controversial public lives - scapegoated UN representative during the Belgian Congo crisis, champion of academic freedom at the University of Ghana, courageously independent political activist, gadfly among the New York intelligentsia of the 1960s, leading Irish nonfiction writer of the twentieth century. This sampler brings together for the first time classic pieces originally published on both sides of the Atlantic. The essays and two early poems included here address topics from the challenges of African politics to Yeats's relationship with fascism to fashionable varieties of Americocentrism.