Sir, —As a student of history and as someone forced out of my childhood home in North Howard Street during the 1969 pogroms, I came away from reading your special issue (HI 17.4, July/Aug. 2009) with mixed feelings. While I welcome the editor’s forthright editorial (‘When is a pogrom not a pogrom?’) and his warning … Read more
Famine: a short history Cormac Ó Gráda (Princeton, $27.95) ISBN 9780691122373 Some time ago, before I went to Tanzania, I asked a class of adults who had returned to education whether they thought that the Great Irish Famine contributed to a particular empathy with the plight of Africa in Ireland. Spontaneously, they replied that … Read more
Bulmer Hobson and the nationalist movement in twentieth-century Ireland Marnie Hay (Manchester University Press, £55) ISBN 9780719079870 Marnie Hay begins her study of Bulmer Hobson (1883–1969) by claiming him to be one of ‘the losers of Irish history’. Despite Hobson’s tireless work as a republican propagandist and as a grassroots organiser for the IRB … Read more
The Fenian problem: insurgency and terrorism in a liberal state Brian Jenkins (Liverpool University Press, £65) ISBN 9781846311758 Some contemporary writers on terrorism argue that the British government’s response to Fenianism set a pattern of moral panic and the repression of civil liberties that has characterised state responses to such challenges down to the … Read more
Sir Walter Ralegh in Ireland Sir John Pope Hennessy Classics of Irish History series, with introduction by Thomas Herron (University College Dublin Press, €24. Originally published by Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., London, 1883) ISBN 9781906359188 Tom Herron has delivered an enhanced version of this short book by a nineteenth-century Irish politician on a … Read more