SOURCE: Paulin, Tom, Colin MacCabe, and Bethan Marshall. “Interview: Tom Paulin Talks to Bethan Marshall and Colin MacCabe.” Critical Quarterly 42, no. 1 (spring 2000): 86-99.

In the following interview, Paulin discusses his views on religious tradition and radical dissent, anti-Semitism in the work of T. S. Eliot, ignorance of canonical literature, and contemporary Irish and British politics.

[MacCabe]: Tom, would you like to start by describing your own intellectual formation?

[Paulin]: I was born in England, baptised Church of England, attended the Church of Ireland when I was a kid—we went to the north of Ireland in 1953 when I was four. My grandmother on my mother's side was Scottish Presbyterian. She and my grandfather moved to the north of Ireland in 1912. I remember occasionally going to my grandmother's church, Fisherwick Presbyterian. The Church of Ireland is very low church—no candles or images or that sort of thing.

And...