'This is a timely book about a major artist whose work explores the porous boundaries between painting, history, and poetry. Using the tools of modernist art such as haunting photographic substructures and offbeat supports, O'Donoghue breathes new life into genres that the modernists despised, namely history and narrative painting. O'Donoghue's rare achievement in our age of cancel culture is to avoid imposing present-day judgements on the past. On the contrary, O'Donoghue views history as a palimpsest or archaeological site where truths lie buried. The past he reveals in his richly layered paintings is a fusion of document and dream, memories and echoes, personal and universal experience. History, O'Donoghue reminds us, seeps into the present and shapes us in ways we rarely anticipate. His ruminative approach encourages us to question issues of agency and causality, and to meditate on the complex, contradictory forces that shape past and present time. The tone for the monograph is set in the preface by poet Tom Paulin, who shares O'Donoghue's deep preoccupation with the after echoes of World War Two.

Through his friendship with poets such as Paulin and Seamus Heaney, O'Donoghue revives the tradition of painter/poet collaborations, and his work draws deeply on literary sources, such as T.S. Eliot and Yeats. All these aspects of his work are explored in perceptive essays written by leading critics and curators, which are complemented by a selection of the artist's own illuminating writings.' - Jill Lloyd, writer and curator specialising in twentieth-century art.