Though some people still try to pretend otherwise, MacNeice as a poet was consistently under rated during his lifetime, both in England and in Ireland; Auden was the glamour Anglo American figure of the era, while most Irish critics of the post Yeatsian era could see little beyond Clarke and Kavanagh. MacNeice appears to have been deeply ambivalent about his mixed: national heritage, as the son of a Home Ruler clergyman (later a bishop) whose ancestors had virtually been driven out of the west of Ireland in the 19th century. His Belfast Carrickfergus childhood was shadowed by the mental illness of his mother and by the presence of a mongoloid brother, and at 10 he was sent to boarding school in England. At Oxford MacNeice was a brilliant student among brilliant contemporaries, though he made an early, unwise marriage which later cost him much suffering and soul searching. An interlude as a classics teacher was followed by his long, productive years at the BBC, where he was one of the glowing lights of the now vanished Third Programme and wrote many radio scripts which were models of their kind. His second marriage, to the singer Hedli Anderson, did not survive growing tensions which MacNeice's attraction to other women made steadily worse; after their parting, he lived with the radio actress Mary Wimbush until his premature death from bronchitis. Often reserved to the point of taciturnity, sociable but introspective, at once hypersensitive and sensual, Mac Neice was/is not an easy man to come to terms with, though he had many friends if relatively few genuine intimates. This biography has been widely praised, but it rarely goes genuinely deep, or even wide, and I cannot believe that it is the final word on its slightly enigmatic subject. Jon Stallworthys grasp of - or perhaps interest in - Irish life and literature of the time is severely limited, and he appears to know or care little about the flourishing literary Dublin to which MacNeice was a frequent (and often critical) visitor. Faber also reissues his unfinished and ultra discreet biography, The Strings Are False (£7.99 in UK) and Edna Longley's Louis Mac Neice: a Critical Study (same price).