D J ENRIGHT, POET, novelist, critic, anthologist and charismatic and independent-minded academic, died last year on New Year's Eve, at the age of eighty-two. This book was completed shortly before his death, with customary diligence and bloody-mindedness. Always a hard worker, Enright took a mordant delight in recording that his latest royalty statement for 2002 showed that he had earned not a penny that year from hs many books.

Injury Time is subtitled 'a memoir'; it is that, among other things. Enright had written an autobiographical book in 1969, the very funny Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor, and in the 1990s he published two books, Interplay and Play Resumed, which took a highly original form, mixing events from his own life with quotations hm hgh and low literature, jokes, aphorisms, arguments, dreams, and expressions of delight and disgust at the more lu&crous aspects of contemporary life. Enright had a close knowledge of French and German