Karl Marx coined a few memorable phrases. But his last recorded utterance was an angry exclamation directed at his London housekeeper: “Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!”

Terry Eagleton, who has written several books on Marx in a prodigious literary career, is less dogmatic about deathbed sayings. The 83-year-old critic is a good deal more humorous too.

“One’s deathbed is an ideal occasion for coming up with high-sounding but vacuous pronouncements, statements which are worthless in direct proportion to their general acceptability. It is the kind of stuff one might hear from the balcony of the Vatican or the United Nations Security Council,” writes Eagleton in his latest, and perhaps last, book (or so he grimly states).

Who knows when our time is up? Eagleton recalls that his father – a “kindly, thoughtful man”, one of the 10 children of Irish immigrants who left school at 14 to work in a factory – learnt he was dying by accident when he overheard a doctor talking about his condition. Eagleton snr was spotted reading a book just once his life – it was an Agatha Christie and he quickly tired of it – whereas his university-educated son has written enough words over the decades to fill a small library.

Shane Lowry distils the mania around him as Donald Trump and Clare Force One hit the course

Trump scraps tariffs on Irish whiskey ‘on behalf of the........

© The Irish Times