Aidan Higgins at Eighty

Often hailed (more especially abroad) as ‘Ireland’s greatest living writer’, the young Aidan Higgins seemed to arrive out of nowhere – fully formed, dangerously clever, handsome, cosmopolitan – his “watchful eye quick to perceive the clinching detail”. Observed his lifelong friend, Samuel Beckett: “in you, together with the beginner, is the old hand”.