Description

Walter Starkie: An Odyssey by Jacqueline Hurtley is a meticulously researched, definitive biography of a truly singular figure in Irish cultural history. Walter Starkie was a dazzling polymath—a Trinity College professor, an accomplished violinist, a director of the Abbey Theatre, a British diplomat in wartime Spain, and a world-renowned authority on Romani language and folklore. Hurtley masterfully pieces together Starkie’s adventurous life, tracking his travels across Europe with a fiddle in hand, embedded within Romani communities, alongside his complex navigating of mid-century geopolitics. The biography dives deep into his literary outputs, his interactions with figures like W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and his critical role in cultural diplomacy during World War II. Hurtley’s work provides an expansive, richly contextualized look at an eccentric academic whose life crossed the boundaries of institutional high culture and the bohemian underworld of European tradition.