Richard S. Grayson (Continuum Books, £25) ISBN 9781847250087 Richard Grayson’s Belfast Boys is the latest addition to a small but growing number of popular and academic books on the Irish experience of the Great War, a subject that just ten years ago was ignored by all but a handful of pioneers. In essence, the … Read more
Tom Garvin (Royal Irish Academy, E30) ISBN 9781904890577 Tom Garvin opens his introduction to this book with the truthful statement that ‘Seán Lemass is commonly seen as the architect of modern Ireland’. Regrettably, he does not acknowledge that, in current circumstances, this could earn the said architect some censure as a jerrybuilder. What Garvin … Read more
Cope (Boydell Press, £50) ISBN 9781843834687 The outbreak of the 1641 rebellion posed two related problems for the English administration in Ireland. First and foremost, the lords justices and council had to suppress the insurgency and organise efforts to defend the colony. Second, they had to relieve those who had been dispossessed by Irish … Read more
Susan Flavin and Evan T. Jones (eds) (Four Courts Press, E65) ISBN 9781846821820 This 1,094-page tome reproduces the details of the cargoes of ships plying between Ireland and the Continent in and out of Bristol for 100 years. Two factors make the work remarkable: the first is that the records survive and the second … Read more
Brian Hanley and Scott Millar (Penguin Ireland, €20) ISBN 9781844881208 The front page of the September 1971 Official Republican paper The United Irishman displayed a photograph of a gunman crouched under a Starry Plough flag and silhouetted against a blazing truck. (See ‘Second glance’ on pp 46–7.) The headline read ‘Army of the People’, … Read more