By Daragh Fitzgerald Alan Kelly’s The struggle for mastery in Ireland, 1442–1540: culture, politics and Kildare–Ormond rivalry documents the tussle for dominance of the English colony in Ireland between the leading magnate families at the time, the Fitzgeralds of Kildare and the Butlers of Ormond. These two leading houses of the old colonial community sustained … Read more
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