Travel writings comprise a marvellous if problematic source for Irish scholars—especially for historians of pre-Famine Ireland. Arguably, these accounts can be grouped broadly into at least three categories. First are those, often written by foreign visitors, which focus on Irish poverty and ‘backwardness’, and frequently attribute them to English or landlord oppression. Historians sympathetic to … Read more
The wolf is as rich an image in literature as it is a reality—albeit a persecuted one—in natural history. Invariably featured as a menace in mythology and folklore, the wolf, demon or hero, is a strange and glamorous creature, the enigmatic ancestor of our domestic dog, and still roams Russian Asia, Canada and Alaska.Anyone with … Read more
The essays collected in this volume have been assembled as a tribute to Nicholas Canny by his colleagues and former students on the occasion of his retirement from the established professorship of history at NUI Galway. They centre on two themes that have been at the heart of Nicholas’s own concerns over the years as … Read more
The Ulster Historical Foundation published eight new titles in 2011 on a very wide range of subjects—everything from George Sigerson (George Sigerson: poet, patriot, scientist and scholar by Ken McGilloway, 168pp, €19.99/£16.99 hb, ISBN 9781903688212), the Gaelic scholar, to George Best (George Best will not be playing today, edited by Barbara McNarry, 176pp, €29.99/£24.99 hb, … Read more
In his review of T. Ryle Dwyer’s Behind the Green Curtain (HI 18.2,March/April 2010), Eoin Dillon states that the book ‘allows present-dayneutrality to be presented as contingent, a pragmatic response ratherthan a fixed principle of Southern foreign policy’. In 1939 the FiannaFáil government quoted the Hague Convention of 1907 to support Irishneutrality. It defines in … Read more