Nick Maxwell The title of this book is ambitious: to extend study of the ‘financial revolution’ of the English-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic. The costs of war created in 1694 the Bank of England, with the right to issue paper money in return for a loan of £1.4 million to the government. Thereafter Britain … Read more
In Ireland we pride ourselves on our historical awareness. The Irish are interested in history, and in their own history in particular. This is obvious at a personal level in, for example, our collective excited engagement with the 1901 and 1911 censuses when they were made available to us on-line in recent years. At a … Read more
In the present climate of cynicism, where the stock of politicians is only marginally above that of bankers, property developers and paedophile priests, it is hard to believe that not so long ago images of political figures—Tone, Emmett, O’Connell, Parnell, etc.—regularly featured on the walls of Irish homes. It is equally hard to believe that … Read more
The expression ‘hidden gem’ is so overused as to be almost valueless but it can be properly applied to St Mary’s Abbey. It really is hidden up a small lane off Capel Street in Dublin. Most of the people living thereabouts, never mind in Dublin as a whole, hardly know of its existence, yet it … Read more
The Tenements was an ambitious four-part series about Dublin’s notorious inner-city slums. Alongside the legacy of the Vikings and the impressive edifices of Georgian Dublin, the existence of the tenements is one of the best-known aspects of Dublin’s history, famously depicted in Seán O’Casey’s trilogy and James Plunkett’s Strumpet City. But this heritage was perhaps … Read more