Alan F. Parkinson (Ulster Historical Foundation, £7.99) ISBN 9781908448521 In the early 2000s I worked in the office of the leader of the Liberal Democrats (then Charles Kennedy) as a speechwriter and the party’s director of policy. The two-storey office was located just off the committee corridor of the House of Commons. To access it, … Read more
ISBN: 978-905569-70-0 Published by Wordwell in December 2012 226pp + illustrations Price €35 Irish Gothic Architecture: construction, decay and reinvention edited by Roger Stalley The volume aims to reshape the study of Gothic architecture in Ireland, examining the way it was perceived and exploited not just in the Middle Ages but in later periods as … Read more
Edmund Spenser: a life Andrew Hadfield (Oxford University Press, £25) ISBN 9780199591022 Londoner Edmund Spenser (1552–99) was already writing poetry by the time he went up to Cambridge as a poor scholar. His first major work, the Shepheardes Calender, was published in 1579 and quickly became famous for its wordplay, being full of archaic usages, … Read more
This year sees the 50th anniversary of JFK’s semi-legendary visit to Ireland (a subject we’ll be tackling in our Hedge School in the National Library on 22 October), but there is a far more significant event that links Ireland and the US: the American Civil War. Perhaps as many as 200,000 Irishmen fought in the … Read more
I first wrote about the Newry museum for this column in 2005. There have been many changes since then. As some readers may know, my first job was as the museum officer in Newry, when I opened the new museum in a converted nineteenth-century coal merchant’s office as part of the arts centre. The museum … Read more