Music to the ears of Yeats fans but an unfortunate neglect of Munster

Words Alone: Yeats and his Inheritances, RF Foster, Oxford University Press, €22.95

ROY FOSTER has had the most splendid career of any Waterford-man in recent years.

A product of the famous Newtown School and of Trinity College Dublin, he became the first Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College whose most famous indifferent student was surely Evelyn Waugh.