EAMON O’KANE Manchester University Press £80 ISBN 9780719090837 Reviewed by Cillian McGrattan Cillian McGrattan lectures in Politics at Ulster University. This valuable and timely book by the political historian Eamonn O’Kane circles around the incongruities, disconnections and unintended consequences that constituted the stuff of the Northern Irish peace process. Because these nuances are often arcane … Read more
JOSEPH E.A. CONNELL Jnr Eastwood Books €20 ISBN 9781913934200 Reviewed by Thomas Earls Fitzgerald Thomas Earls Fitzgerald is the author of Combatants and civilians in revolutionary Ireland, 1918–1923 (Routledge, 2021). In late October/early November 1920 the Kerry IRA orchestrated a county-wide series of attacks against the Royal Irish Constabulary. In response, the recently deployed Black … Read more
Michael SmithThe O’Brien Press€16.99ISBN 9781788492324 Reviewed by James Bartlett James Bartlett is a writer and journalist. A couple of years ago, horror mini-series The Terror shone a light on a Banbridge-born sailor who was reported to be the last man alive on the most infamous journey in Arctic history—the ‘lost’ 1845 expedition led by Sir … Read more
NICHOLAS VINCENT (ed.) Oxford University Press £95 per hardback volume ISBN 9780198738213 Reviewed by Jesse Harrington This new series provides a complete edition of the letters and charters of Henry II, king of England from 1154 to 1189. It represents the culmination of three decades’ labour in archives, libraries, project files and card indexes by … Read more
By Joe Culley @TheRealCulls We have mentioned here before the new literary genre of ‘biography of a year’. Now the Royal Irish Academy has got in on the act with the splendid Ireland 1922: independence, partition, civil war. And the good news for the casual reader is that, despite the book’s subtitle, there’s far more … Read more