Increasingly Samuel Beckett is seen as the culmination of the great literature of the twentieth century - the successor to Proust, Joyce and Kafka, and a writer whose relevance to his time and use of poetic imagery can be compared to Shakespeare's in the late Renaissance. But John Calder has examined the work of Beckett principally for what it has to say about our time in terms of philosophy, theology and ethics, and he points to aspects of his subject's thinking that others have ignored or preferred not to see.