"Carson calls her book An Oresteia—as opposed to the Oresteia. This isn’t the trilogy of Aeschylus. Rather, the book consists of plays by three different authors: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Electra, Euripides’ Orestes. Each takes up some aspect of the House of Atreus, whose members, relations and dependents included not only Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and Helen, but Orestes, Electra, Menelaus, Cassandra . . . Many of them, predictably, came to a bad end. Half a century separates Agamemnon from Orestes, and Carson, who supplies an introduction to each play, offers interesting speculation about how shifts in tone and perspective may reflect developments in Athenian history. Perhaps equally striking, however, is the continuity in her trilogy. In American poetry, anyway, 50 years is a long time (it would bridge the gulf between, say, Robert Frost and John Ashbery), and Carson’s intelligent compilation—an Oresteia—attests to our enduring fascination in watching the highest-born families laid low."—Brad Leithauser, The New York Times Book Review

"Anyone who mourns the disappearance of leaders with real civility and magnetism—or of topical dramas with the same attributes—will be buoyed by [this] extraordinary play . . . Democracy is not another game of Cold War cat-and-mouse. It's really a play about loyalty, one that, in a satisfying way, ends up testing ours."—Peter Marks, The Washington Post

"[Heaney has] composed a poem full of brilliant strokes . . . He varies his rhythms ingeniously."—Garry Wills, The New York Times Book Review

"Talking Heads places Alan Bennett in the highest tier of English dramatic writers."—The New York Times