Irish rural interiors in art Claudia Kinmonth (Yale University Press, e58.80) ISBN 9780300107326 Traditionally, most mainline historians have made little use of visual sources when analysing Ireland’s past. This began to change in the early 1990s. A number of publications, such as Raymond Gillespie and Brian Kennedy’s Ireland, art into history (Dublin, 1994), appeared that … Read more
Leopold H. Kerney, Irish Minister to Spain 1935–1946 Éamon Kerney (ed.) (www.leopoldhkerney.com) In this era of new technology, not all works of historical research end up in printed form. One recent publication that to date has only a website existence is by Éamon Kerney. This is a study of his father, Leopold H. Kerney, Irish … Read more
The history of cricket in County Kilkenny—the forgotten game Michael O’Dwyer (O’Dwyer Books, ‘Garvaghey’, College Gardens, Kilkenny, e35 + e7 p&p) Michael O’Dwyer’s book is correctly subtitled ‘the forgotten game’. Whatever else we may think of when we think of Kilkenny, cricket hardly leaps to mind. And yet this book, drawing on the ample documentation … Read more
Civilizing Ireland. Ordnance Survey 1824–42: ethnography, cartography, translation Stiofán Ó Cadhla (Irish Academic Press, hb e47.50, pb e20) ISBN 9780716533726, 9780716528814 This book seeks to examine cultural and ethnographic aspects of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, established in 1824. The project sought to map Ireland, to standardise its placenames and to record its physical and … Read more
Spies, informers and the ‘Anti-Sinn Féin Society’: the intelligence war in Cork City, 1920–1921 John Borgonovo (Irish Academic Press, e30) ISBN 0716528339 ‘Intelligence’ is perhaps the trickiest aspect of the Irish revolution to write about in a scholarly way. Sources are often fragmentary and unreliable, mythologies are ample and enduring, and many events only make … Read more