Sir, —In his examiner’s report on my Harry Boland’s Irish Revolution (HI 12.2, Summer 2004), Manus O’Riordan awards me ‘9 out of 10 as to balanced presentation of a voluminous amount of evidence’, but a miserable fail in applying my ‘declared aim of impartiality’ to the ‘accompanying commentary’. Though I declared no such aims in … Read more
Sir ,—Brendan Bradshaw’s interview technique in relation to Tim Pat Coogan (HI 12.2, Summer 2004) was anodyne in the extreme. The nationally minded renowned academic Professor Bradshaw afforded the green light to Mr Coogan in every sense of the word, allowing him to propagate, unchallenged, his Gaedhil distorted nationalist image of Irish history. Mr … Read more
Sir, —In his rather superficial discussion of the JFK assassination in the last issue (HI 11.4, Winter 2003), Mel Ayton matches the wilder speculations of the conspiracy theorists with some of his own. Among these is his unqualified assertion of the most fantastic of the conclusions of the Warren Report—the so-called ‘single bullet theory’. … Read more
Sir, —Jim Jordan (Letters, HI 11.4, Winter 2003) has provided useful background on the ethnic conflicts that partly lay behind the New York draft riots (see my article in HI 11.3, Autumn 2003). It is of course quite normal to embed the riots in a wider narrative like Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish became white. … Read more
They say that the only thing worse than a bad review is no review at all. Unfortunately, where History Ireland is concerned, this has been the case with many of the books sent to us for review by publishers. In 2003, for example, over 130 books were submitted but only 27 were reviewed. And that’s … Read more