John Borgonovo (Cork University Press, €39) ISBN 9781909005822 After a slow start, local histories of the Irish revolution have multiplied over the past fifteen years, with monographs on Sligo, Longford, Limerick and Clare, as well as wider-ranging regional studies, chapters in the massive county volumes of interdisciplinary essays from Geography Publications, more or less ‘popular’ … Read more
Alan F. Parkinson (Ulster Historical Foundation, £7.99) ISBN 9781908448521 In the early 2000s I worked in the office of the leader of the Liberal Democrats (then Charles Kennedy) as a speechwriter and the party’s director of policy. The two-storey office was located just off the committee corridor of the House of Commons. To access it, … Read more
ISBN: 978-905569-70-0 Published by Wordwell in December 2012 226pp + illustrations Price €35 Irish Gothic Architecture: construction, decay and reinvention edited by Roger Stalley The volume aims to reshape the study of Gothic architecture in Ireland, examining the way it was perceived and exploited not just in the Middle Ages but in later periods as … Read more
Edmund Spenser: a life Andrew Hadfield (Oxford University Press, £25) ISBN 9780199591022 Londoner Edmund Spenser (1552–99) was already writing poetry by the time he went up to Cambridge as a poor scholar. His first major work, the Shepheardes Calender, was published in 1579 and quickly became famous for its wordplay, being full of archaic usages, … Read more
Lone crusader: David Thornley and the intellectuals Edward Thornley (Ashfield Press, €21.50) ISBN 9789068798 The premature death of David Thornley in June 1978 deprived Ireland of a significant intellectual best known for his current affairs work on RTÉ’s Seven Days programme and as a Labour TD for Dublin North-West from 1969 to 1977. Unseated … Read more