Today the barriers between high and low culture have crumbled and academics study soap operas as well as sonnets. But does our obsession with ‘culture’ mean we have overlooked the things that really matter? Can we still be politically engaged in today’s free-wheeling, postmodern, consumer era? Terry Eagleton’s acclaimed Literary Theory established him as one of the leading cultural theorists of the Left. Now, he argues, the age of theory is over. It is time to urgently re-engage with the essential truths that postmodernism has denied

love, evil, death, morality, metaphysics, religion and revolution

as they matter today more than ever.