If Hugh Leonard had a taste for grandiose subtitles, there are several that might have graced the cover of [Home Before Night]: 'The Making of a Playwright', or 'The Birth of the New Ireland' to name but two of the themes that curl around this memoir of the years before he found his vocation. But if Leonard does have a message for the reader it is that one good story is worth a bargain basement of themes; and Home Before Night leaves you to sort them out for yourself….

Home Before Night is another fruit of Leonard's fully ripened maturity, and I found it an unqualified delight from start to finish…. The nutrients in this case include a marvellous eye for character, the ability to weave show-stopping funny stories into larger narrative, and recreation of the past with the sensuous immediacy of childhood. As for waste matter, Leonard's...