Nick Maxwell TARIQ ALI Verso £20 ISBN 9781788735773 Reviewed by Kevin Kiely Kevin Kiely is the author of Harvard’s patron: Jack of All Poets (CreateSpace, 2018). Tariq Ali, after writing The forty-year war in Afghanistan, ably presents Churchill using warlord tropes reflecting England’s planned agendas of imperialism in the lineage of Cromwell, (Robert) Peel, Gladstone, Thatcher and … Read more
DANIEL AYIOTIS Eastwood Books €25 9781913934330 Reviewed by Marie Coleman Marie Coleman is Professor of Twentieth-Century Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast. I first visited the Irish Military Archives in November 1993 to conduct research for my undergraduate history dissertation on the Irish Civil War. Thirty years later the archives’ collections—in particular the on-line Military … Read more
VOL. 1. VIKINGS TO VICTORIANS: A HISTORY OF DUBLIN CASTLE TO 1850 SEÁN DUFFY, JOHN MONTAGUE, KEVIN MULLIGAN and MICHAEL O’NEILL National Monuments Service €50 ISBN 9781446880715 Reviewed by John Gibney Dublin Castle is arguably the most symbolic building, or complex of buildings, on the island of Ireland. For many nationalists and republicans in the … Read more
By Joe Culley @TheRealCulls It’s a familiar story, almost a cliché: in the 1880s a young woman from a large family leaves the struggling farm in Sligo to emigrate to New York. There she finds work as a domestic servant, a ‘Biddy’, dutifully sends home remittances, makes an unhappy marriage, has children, and through hard … Read more
By Donal Fallon This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the unveiling of Ian Ritchie’s Spire in O’Connell Street, a modern addition to the main thoroughfare which Ritchie said was ‘inspired by the ever-changing light and composition of the Irish skies’. Just over a thousand curious Dubliners gathered in the street below to watch the … Read more