Hope Without OptimismTERRY EAGLETON(YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 176 PP, £18.99)Tablet bookshop price £17.10 • Tel 01420 592974 Terry Eagleton, the grandee of English literary criticism, is a self-confessed constitutional pessimist, “one for whom the glass is not only half-empty but almost certain to contain some foul-­tasting, potentially lethal, liquid”. He calls his latest book “Hope Without Optimism” because he scorns buying hope on the cheap, or the taking of a sunny view of the universe simply out of empty-headed cheerfulness. The Thomist notion that the virtue of hope is best inculcated as a habit rather than just absent-mindedly acquired through a natural disposition – in the modern rather than the medieval sense of the word – ru