MixedThe Times (UK)There will not be much political writing in this or any other year that is carried off with such style. Some of O’Toole’s set pieces and conceits are column-writing of the highest order ... The book teems with telling metaphors and images ... O’Toole, a columnist and critic for The Irish Times, is a sharp thinker as well as a prose stylist and the book is teeming with good points ... There is also a lot to learn from O’Toole’s incidental arguments. This is a literary book ... Not all of O’Toole’s arguments land. His claim that opposition to the EU replaced the racist impulse in British politics is a bit hard to swallow ... There are also intriguing questions that are left hanging ... The strongest reservation about Heroic Failure is that it is a comforting and luxurious read for people who already agree. O’Toole tells you what you think already better than you could say it yourself. Unless, of course, you don’t think it already, in which case he is unlikely to persuade you. Indeed, he is not even trying to. He’s having too much fun although that is a strangely limited ambition. He doesn’t want to win converts. There are times when the vitality of the writing spills over into insult ... The tone of intellectual certainty, decked out with literary allusion, is not the only reason it is hard to avoid the feeling that this is a London Review of Books essay unnaturally elongated.
