KARINA HOLTON Four Courts Press €49 ISBN 9781846827051 Reviewed by: Sylvie Kleinman Sylvie Kleinman has worked for the Dictionary of Irish Biography. This book makes the compelling case that Valentine Lawless, second Baron Cloncurry, was ‘second only to the [3rd] Duke of Leinster’ among high-ranking Liberal Protestants during the first half of the nineteenth century. … Read more
GERARD MURPHY The Collins Press €19.99 ISBN 9781848893375 Reviewed by: Nigel Jones Nigel Jones is a former editor of History Today and BBC History Magazine. The fatal shooting of Michael Collins in his own Cork countryside not only deprived Ireland of its most dynamic, gifted and charismatic leader but also left an enduring mystery. Was … Read more
THOMAS BARTLETT (ed.) Cambridge University Press €140/£100 ISBN 9781107113541 Reviewed by: Brian Hanley This volume of the Cambridge History of Ireland sets out to tell the story of Ireland from 1880 to the present day. Editor Thomas Bartlett has argued that such a project was ‘badly needed’, not because of a dearth of scholarship on modern … Read more
By Joe Culley At the height of the Famine, an English Quaker and philanthropist, James Hack Tuke, visited Connemara to assist the stricken populace and witnessed its full horrors. So when similar conditions threatened the region 30 years later, Tuke again mobilised his resources to help avert a catastrophe. His story is told in Gerard … Read more
JONATHAN EVERSHED Notre Dame Press £43 ISBN 9780268103859 Reviewed by Brian Hanley Brian Hanley is a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh. In contemporary Ireland, many see commemoration of the Great War as aiding reconciliation, hoping that the ‘shared human costs’ of the conflict might ‘transcend local Irish political sectarian differences’. As Jonathan Evershed … Read more