August 06
1972 Idi Amin, dictator of Uganda, announced that 50,000 Asians with British passports were to be expelled from the country to the UK within the next three months, as they were ‘sabotaging the Ugandan economy’.
Nick Maxwell
DEATHS OF IRISH PATRIOTS: BRUGHA, GRIFFITH, COLLINS
By Joseph E.A. Connell Jr The Civil War was the lowest point in recent Irish history. Few wars are as bitter as civil wars; few civil wars were as bitter as the Irish Civil War. Its brutality was horrifying, and the tactics of both sides did no justice to the causes for which they fought. … Read more
The Devil from over the Sea: Remembering and Forgetting Oliver Cromwell in Ireland
SARAH COVINGTON Oxford University Press £25 ISBN 9780198848318 Reviewed by Guy Beiner Guy Beiner is the Sullivan Chair of Irish Studies at Boston College. In the Irish countryside, a hex of ‘scrios Cromaill ort’ (typically cast by an elderly woman or a widow) was dreaded. The ‘Curse of Cromwell’ conjured up deep-rooted and traumatic historical … Read more
THE IRISH ASSASSINS: conspiracy, revenge, and the Phoenix Park Murders that stunned Victorian England
JULIE KAVANAGH Grove Press £18.99 ISBN 9781611856415 Reviewed by Barry Walsh Barry Walsh is a solicitor and a former Policy Adviser at the Department of An Taoiseach. The final decades of British rule in Ireland have been examined by many British authors in the last century, often with mixed results. The works of Charles Townshend, … Read more
‘THE FIRST NATIONAL MUSEUM’: Dublin’s Natural History Museum in the mid-nineteenth century
SHERRA MURPHY Cork University Press €39 ISBN 9781782054559 Reviewed by Tony Canavan Tony Canavan is Consultant Editor of Books Ireland. Ireland’s Natural History Museum—or the ‘Dead Zoo’, as it is called in popular tradition—is well known to most Irish people, from school visits if nothing else. In this interesting book, Sherra Murphy traces the history … Read more