Ireland and the British Empire Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series Kevin Kenny (ed.) Oxford University Press, £30 ISBN 0199251835 Victoria’s Ireland Peter Gray (ed.) Four Courts Press, £55 ISBN 185 1 827587 Irish participation in empire is most commonly considered a paradox: another unnatural by-product of the malign influence of British … Read more
Ireland, Germany and the Nazis: politics and diplomacy, 1919–1939 Mervyn O’Driscoll (Four Courts Press, £55) ISBN 185 1 824804 Ireland, Europe and the Marshall Plan Till Geiger and Michael Kennedy (eds.) (Four Courts Press, £55) ISBN 185 1 825193 Mervyn O’Driscoll’s Ireland, Germany and the Nazis is a positive contribution to the existing corpus … Read more
Colmán of Cloyne: a study Paul MacCotter (Four Courts Press, €30) ISBN 1 851 827935 Colmán mac Léinín, credited with the foundation of the sixth-century monastery of Cluain Uama, Cloyne, Co. Cork, has been rather neglected by modern scholarship. Paul MacCotter speculates that the absence of an extant Vita, if one was ever written, … Read more
Divided Gaels: Gaelic cultural identities in Scotland and Ireland c. 1200–c. 1650 Wilson McLeod (Oxford University Press, £50) ISBN 0 199 247226 Ulster and the Isles in the fifteenth century: the lordship of the Clann Domhnaill of Antrim Simon Kingston (Four Courts Press, £55) ISBN 1 851 827293 In the wake of the establishment … Read more
What was an ‘angel’? ‘Castle chamber’? ‘Raskins’? A ‘Cunningham acre’? So asks the dust-jacket of Byrne’s dictionary of Irish local history (pp352, £20 pb, ISBN 1856354237), published by Mercier Press. The description on the cover—‘an extensive range of key local history terminology, a must for all local historians’—is far too modest and is qualified by … Read more