column on poetry to the Sunday Independent. His first collection of poems, called simply Poems (Cresset, London), was published in 1958. Several collections followed and his Collected Poems (New Island, Dublin) was published in 2004. The End of the Modern World (New Island, 2016), written over several decades, was his final publication. Cronin's novel, The Life of Riley, is a satire on bohemian life in Ireland in the mid-20th century, while his memoir Dead as Doornails addresses the same subject. Cronin knew Samuel Beckett from when they did some work for the BBC during the 1950s and 1960s. Cronin gave a prefatory talk to Patrick Magee's reading of The Unnamable on the BBC Third Programme. Beckett was not impressed: "Cronin delivered his discourse… It was all right, not very exciting". Cronin later published a biography of him. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (1996) followed on from No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien (1989). Bibliography Verse: main collections Poems (London: Cresset, 1958) Collected Poems, 1950-73 (Dublin: New Writers Press, 1973) Reductionist Poem (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1980) RMS Titanic (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1981) 41 Sonnet Poems (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1982) New and Selected Poems (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, and Manchester: Carcanet, 1982) Letters to an Englishman (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1985) The End of the Modern World (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1989 and 1998; reissued in a new expanded edition, Dublin: New Island Books, 2016) Relationships (Dublin: New Island Press, 1992) Minotaur (Dublin: New Island Books, 1999) Collected Poems (Dublin: New Island Press, 2004) The Fall (Dublin: New Island Books, 2010) Body and Soul (Dublin: New Island Books, 2014) Novels The Life of Riley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1964; reissued, Dublin: New Island 2012). Identity Papers (Dublin: Co-Op Books, 1980) Literary Criticism and Commentary Botteghe oscure : quaderno XII, Roma, (De Luca editore, 1953, contributor) A Question of Modernity, a collection of critical essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1966) Heritage Now: Irish Literature in the English Language (Dingle: Brandon 1982) An Irish Eye (Dingle: Brandon 1985) Art for the People?: Letters from the "New Island" (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1995) Ireland: A Week in the Life of a Nation, text by (Century, 1986) An Illustrated Historical Map of Ireland, text by (London: Cassell, 1980) Personal Anthology: Selections from his Sunday Independent Feature (Dublin: New Island Books, 2000) Plays The Shame of It, printed in