H. Gustav Klaus (ed.) (O’Brien Press, £15.99) This is several books rolled into one—biography, letters, poems, plays, and essays, the whole project ‘illustrated with historic photographs, documents and ephemera’. The title suggests a simplistic approach belied by the contents. This is a book that will enchant, inform, anger and frustrate, as much as the events … Read more
Jeremy Williams (Irish Academic Press, £35) In his foreword to this book Mark Girouard recalls schoolboy holidays in Ireland and a youthful appreciation of Irish nineteenth-century classicism gained through the seat of his trousers on sliding down the staircase balustrade of an aunt’s Greek-revival house. Jeremy Williams A Companion Guide to Architecture in Ireland, 1837-1921 … Read more
GH: Tell us about your background. JL: I was born in Tralee, County Kerry, in 1942. I spent my first nine years in the tranquil environment of Castlegregory, a village sixteen miles west of Tralee on the north side of the Dingle peninsula, where my father was a guard. We then moved to Ballinasloe, and … Read more
The absence of a strong tradition of farmer parties in a country with a very substantial proportion of the workforce engaged in agriculture has long been a source of puzzlement to students of twentieth-century Irish politics. Those farmers’ parties that have appeared in independent Ireland have never threatened to become majority parties nor have any … Read more
Sir,—I feel I should step in between Mr Bowman and Professor Boyce, if only to declare a ‘no contest’ (HI Winter 1994). As I said in my book on the 16th (Irish) Division (Ireland’s unknown soldiers), the formation’s infantry (as distinct from its supporting arms) was always largely Catholic Irish. Bowman should not cite my … Read more