Horace thought an author should leave a poem for nine years before publishing it. Most of this book was written more than twenty years ago and only now sees the light of day.

The Robin Hood story deals with the interesting figure of the man who, when tyranny and corruption reigns, finds himself an outlaw. The Dracula story is about the dualism of our age's imagination and its necessity to believe in an ultimate metaphysical evil. "And why not?" derives from a personal experience. Billy the Kid was inspired by the early American history of opposition to banking, a history that is less well known than it ought to be.

Otello was a response to Zeferelli's film of the Verdi opera.

Gaelic literature is replete with accounts of the meeting between Oisin (Ossian) and Patrick, and expresses eloquently the ambivalent attitude of the old Gaels to the new Christianity.

The Greatest Name of Allah is a story that I heard orally, and, while on Hajj, some aspects of it came to me and I wrote them down.

The poem God is Dead was conceived as prose on O'Connell Street in Dublin while gazing on the happy shoppers.

The Colt is a much later poem, which, contrary to God is Dead, I actually intended from the first as a poem.