Conor McCarthy (Four Courts Press,E45) ISBN 1851824758 The notion that Ireland is wracked by an unprecedented cultural crisis has become a new orthodoxy accepted both by the side-bar columnists of the Irish Times and the cosmopolitan academic elite. The theoretical basis for this approach was located in the Anglo-American disciplines of cultural studies and post-colonial … Read more
Sean Farren (Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, Belfast, £16.50) ISBN 0853895953 This is a thought provoking study. Sean Farren provides us not only with an insight into developments in the schools in both Northern Ireland and the Free State/Republic of Ireland, but shows the extent to which the schools were used by political and … Read more
Linda Connolly (Palgrave, E80.60) ISBN 33377132X This is a book by a sociologist which has a lot to offer historians. Its central focus is on the women’s movement in the Irish Republic from 1970 to the 1990s. The context for this is set by a brief survey of developments over the preceding hundred and more … Read more
John Horne & Alan Kramer (Yale University Press, £27.50) ISBN 0521582172 Conceiving Revolution—Irish Nationalist propaganda during the First World War Ben Novick(Four Courts Press, E24.95) ISBN 1851826203 The justification of war can be a bitter and acrimonious matter capable of driving regimes to desperate ends to maintain the moral high ground. One state’s victory is … Read more
Alan Gilsenan’s two-part documentary The Ghost of Roger Casement was neatly timed to coincide with new evidence on the Black Diaries controversy, which has since erupted in the letters page of the Irish Times. The programmes rightly reflected the complexity of Casement’s life, and the difficulty in analysing a character who was at the heart … Read more