ELLEN McWILLIAMS Beyond the Pale Books €18.99 ISBN 9781914318245 REVIEWED BY Barry Keane Barry Keane is the author of Massacre in West Cork (Mercier Press, 2014). A sense of place excites the Irish imagination. Living awkwardly between the Irish and English worlds, Ellen McWilliams lectures in English literature in Exeter. Her husband was studying the … Read more
THOMAS KENEALLY Faber & Faber €17.50 ISBN 9780571387960 REVIEWED BY Frank MacGabhann Frank MacGabhann is a retired lawyer currently researching the Catalpa rescue of Fenian prisoners in 1876. The late Gore Vidal maintained that one can learn more, sometimes far more, about a historical period or personage from a historical novel than from many historians. … Read more
SUSAN ARTHURE, STEPHANIE JAMES, DYMPHNA LONERGAN and FIDELMA McCORRY (eds) Wakefield Press AU$45.00 ISBN 9781923042339 REVIEWED BY Elizabeth Malcolm Elizabeth Malcolm’s most recent article, with Val Noone and Dianne Hall, is ‘Irish women in Australia and Irish-Australian women: a survey and bibliography’ (2022), available at: https://isaanz.org. This collection of studies devoted to the Irish in … Read more
HOWARD CLARKE and MÁIRE NÍ LAOI Royal Irish Academy €50 ISBN 9781802050028 REVIEWED BY Fintan Lane Fintan Lane is a historian with an interest in the social history of nineteenth-century Ireland. Since its beginning in 1986, the Irish Historic Towns Atlas (IHTA) series, published by the Royal Irish Academy, has documented the topographical development of … Read more
PETER BROWN Princeton University Press £38 9780691242286 REVIEWED BY Thomas O’Loughlin I cannot think of any book comparable to this, and so, while reading it was an immense pleasure, writing this review is rather difficult. There are at least three possible starting-points and I cannot choose between them: Peter Brown in writing an autobiography has … Read more