Nick Maxwell – Page 835 – History Ireland

Turning points of the Irish revolution: the British government, intelligence and the cost of indifference, 1912–1921

Turning points of the Irish revolution: the British government, intelligence and the cost of indifference, 1912–1921 Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon (Palgrave Macmillan, £42.50) ISBN 9781403980038 This is a well-structured book that provides the first sustained analysis of Colonial Office intelligence reports from 1913 to 1920. These indicate that Dublin Castle was better informed about the secret activities … Read more

‘The glory of being Britons’: civic unionism in nineteenth-century Belfast

‘The glory of being Britons’: civic unionism in nineteenth-century Belfast John Bew (Irish Academic Press, €39.95) ISBN 9780716529743 This book challenges much received wisdom. Most accounts of nineteenth-century Ulster unionism emphasise the role of Orangeism and Evangelicalism in sustaining a pan-Protestant alliance and argue that its alleged cultural hegemony stifled alternative political currents within Ulster … Read more

The insider: the Belfast prison diaries of Eamonn Boyce, 1956–1962

The insider: the Belfast prison diaries of Eamonn Boyce, 1956–1962 Anna Bryson (ed.) (Lilliput Press, €40) ISBN 9781843511298 The history of the IRA ‘border campaign’ of 1956–62 is in its infancy. Very few titles have focused on the republican offensive that made Seán South and Fergal O’Hanlon household names of their generation. This writer’s From … Read more

Print the legend

In 1864 a horse called ‘Biddy Early’ in a race at Scariff refused a jump, unseating its rider. This was typical of the type of story recorded by Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory when she visited Feakle some twenty years after Biddy’s death. Her book Visions and beliefs in the west of Ireland was published in … Read more