Subjects as diverse as Ian Paisley's rhetoric and T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism; poets including Elizabeth Bishop, John Clare, Louis MacNeice and Gerard Manley Hopkins; the art of criticism itself--all come under the eye of one of our most impassioned and exciting critics. Tom Paulin's political nous and intellectual rigour, his championing of the sort of "meltfresh, newpainted, all-in-the-moment" journalism that marked William Hazlitt as one of the greatest critics of his age, and his own exemplary subscription to this school of writing, make "Writing to the Moment" essential reading for all students of literature and vernacular culture.