CARLA KING UCD Press €50 ISBN 9781906359928 Reviewed by Conor McNamara Published towards the end of the centenary year of the 1916 Rising, Carla King’s monumental biography of the later life of Michael Davitt concludes by noting the startling omission of serious analysis of Davitt’s political vision in the discourse of Irish revolutionaries during the … Read more
By Joe Culley In We bled together: Michael Collins, the Squad and the Dublin Brigade, Dominic Price collates much familiar material and, importantly, mines new sources to tell the story of Collins and his ‘Squad’ from before the War of Independence right through to the Civil War and beyond. This might be called a popular … Read more
MICHAEL RYAN Mercier Press €17.99 ISBN 9781781175187 Reviewed by Fergus Whelan Much has been written about the IRA in the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. Historians, journalists and participants have published studies on the role of the Provisional IRA in our more recent ‘troubles’. Not nearly as much attention, however, has been … Read more
SHANE NAGLE Bloomsbury £91.80 ISBN 9781474263764 Reviewed by Angus Mitchell In 1954 the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield inaugurated the Wiles lecture series at Queen’s University, Belfast. In his opening address, titled‘The history of historiography’, he argued that German historians had much to answer for: ‘In their function of eliciting or discerning the essential traditions of … Read more
THEO FARRELL Bodley Head £25 ISBN 9781847923462 Reviewed by Lar Joye A story is told of a British Army regimental commander in the early 2000s meeting a group of Afghan elders who gave out to him for burning down their local market-place. Returning to his HQ, he demanded to know what idiot had burnt down … Read more