Catholic Belfast and nationalist Ireland in the era of Joe Devlin, 1871–1934 A. C. Hepburn (Oxford University Press, £55) ISBN 9780199298846 To his admirers, ‘Wee’ Joe Devlin was a gifted orator, a powerful defender of Catholic rights and a champion of the working class, while detractors tend to see him as a ‘green Tory’, a … Read more
‘The glory of being Britons’: civic unionism in nineteenth-century Belfast John Bew (Irish Academic Press, €39.95) ISBN 9780716529743 This book challenges much received wisdom. Most accounts of nineteenth-century Ulster unionism emphasise the role of Orangeism and Evangelicalism in sustaining a pan-Protestant alliance and argue that its alleged cultural hegemony stifled alternative political currents within Ulster … Read more
Coolacrease. The true story of the Pearson executions—an incident in the Irish War of Independence Philip O’Connor (ed.) (Aubane Historical Society, €20) ISBN 9781903497487 On a superficial level this book is about an incident in County Offaly during the Irish War of Independence in which two brothers were executed by the IRA. Richard and Abraham … Read more
Bookworm is always on the lookout for publications that appeal to a particular type of (usually desperate) reader: Leaving Cert and A-level students, lazy undergrads, or general readers whose enthusiasm for history is not matched by the necessary leisure time to plough through academic monographs (although with the deepening recession that could change). A case … Read more
Sir John Soane’s Museum 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London WC2A 3BP +44 (0)20 7405 2107, jbrock@soane.org.uk, www.soane.org Tues.– Sat. 10.00am–5pm by Tony Canavan Lincoln’s Inn Fields is one of those squares typical of this part of London, in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses surround a green space. Number 13 does not particularly stand out among … Read more