PÁDRAIG LENIHAN University College Dublin Press €42.85 ISBN 9781906359836 Reviewed by Martin Mansergh Few past military leaders are associated with melodies still played today. Handel’s glorious See the conquering hero comes was written in 1747 in honour of ‘Butcher’ Cumberland’s ruthless suppression of the Jacobites. Marshal Radetzky, who crushed revolution in northern Italy in 1849, … Read more
ROB GOODBODY Royal Irish Academy in association with Dublin City Council €30 ISBN 9781908996343 Reviewed by Arnold Horner Now in its fourth decade and operating under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy, the Irish Historic Towns Atlas has produced a steady, impressive and quite distinctive flow of publications focusing on historical aspects of the … Read more
ANDREW SANDERS Edinburgh University Press €14.25 ISBN 9780748641123 Despite a title with a very contemporary resonance, Andrew Sanders’s book is actually a history of Irish republicanism from the 1960s to the present, with an introductory chapter beginning in 1916. Thus the title of the book seems somewhat controversial in appearing to deny legitimacy to all … Read more
DONAL FALLON New Island €14.99 ISBN 9781848403260 When the Berlin Wall was attacked and conquered by an agitated mob in 1989, it was followed quickly by the tearing down of statues of the old regimes in Eastern Europe. More recently, in 2003 the world witnessed the attack on the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad; … Read more
ROBERT McLAUGHLIN University of Toronto Press CAN$29.95 ISBN 9781442610972 Any book on the Irish that begins with the 1998 peace talks in the North and ends with a reminder about Orange gunrunning during the Troubles is bound to fall into cliché. Robert McLaughlin’s Irish Canadian conflict and the struggle for Irish independence, 1912–1925 is no … Read more