Nick Maxwell Vietnam seemed an unlikely arena for what would become ‘Johnson’s War’, but the US had been engaged in south-east Asia since World War II. In 1940 France lost control of its colony, Indochina (Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam), to Japan. A Vietnamese independence movement, comprised of intellectuals and nationalists, was determined to resist the return of … Read more
Family and early years Ysidro Francis Edgeworth’s grandfather, Richard, was a utilitarian, following the philosopher Bentham in believing that sensory pleasure and pain are everything and that morally correct actions maximise a population’s happiness, defined as aggregate pleasure minus pain. The moral code should be deduced from this maximisation principle and not from ‘truths’ … Read more
The Gosselin–Balfour papers show that by December 1887 a member of the Irish Party was employed by British intelligence to report on its internal difficulties, many of which were financial. For example, in June 1888 Gosselin’s agent reported that Sir T. G. Esmonde, a Catholic member of the landed gentry and Irish Party MP, had … Read more
One night in summer 1865, Andrew Byrne returned to his hotel room in New York a little the worse for wear after a night of drinking with friends. Drowsy with wine, he blew out the light without turning off the gas, which filled the room as he slept heavily. Fortuitously, a fanlight over his door … Read more
In 1891 the RSAI initiated a photographic collection, which today consists of over 20,000 photographs, negatives and lantern-slides. Perhaps the best-known images are from a relatively small collection known as the ‘Darkest Dublin’ photographs. These were submitted to Dublin Corporation’s housing inquiry of November 1913 by John Cooke, who gave evidence on behalf of the … Read more