The dust-jacket of Éibhear Walshe’s anthology of the Irish writings of the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) reproduces a portrait of her by Patrick Hennessy, standing statuesquely in pale blue evening dress at the top of the grand staircase of her family home at Bowen’s Court, Farahy, north Cork. Bowen’s face, lit by a shaft … Read more
This attractive-looking edited collection brings together a team of geologists, scientists, archaeologists, conservationists and other researchers to produce a wide-ranging scholarly publication on Lough Swilly and its surrounding area in north Donegal. Its eleven chapters investigate such diverse topics as geology and geomorphology, history and archaeology, geography, aquaculture and conservation. The stunning photography on almost … Read more
This book is a tale of maps and a man—of maps because the author spent most of his working life in the Ordnance Survey of Ireland until he retired, having risen through the ranks to become director, but also of the man and his quests, desires and fears, from the time he grew up in … Read more
Since Kildare and Carrickfergus were published in 1986, the Irish Historic Towns Atlas has produced 24 ‘fascicles’. What is a fascicle, you might ask? It is one of the divisions of a book published in parts. And, true to their word, the IHTA has bound numbers one to six and numbers seven to ten into … Read more
From the mid-nineteenth century, the influence of Cardinal Paul Cullen (1803–78) was ubiquitous within Irish society. He was, as Colin Barr notes in this collection, ‘arguably the most important figure between the death of Daniel O’Connell and the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell’ (p. 414). As Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh succinctly argues, regardless of whether his … Read more