Donkey’s Years and Dog Days were the first two volumes of these remarkable memoirs, of which The Whole Hog now completes the Higgins Bestiary. This spirited and quirky penman has always set himself apart form the general grind of Irish writing and its set themes, to run along the line of the exposed nerve-system. No other Irish writer has been so obsessed with the terrain inconnu of lost or thwarted love as this odd-man-out. From salad love with Molly Cushen, to Philippa Phillips in the dunes, to a young American wife in Spain at the time of the Bay of Pigs, or a divorcee in Copenhagen, a tax inspectress in London, the Jacaranda Street tease in Johannesburg, the mirth is barely contained.