Cruel Britannia: a secret history of torture

Ian Cobain (Portobello Books, £18.99) ISBN 9781846273339 Many years ago, when the UK prime minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, was eager to proclaim the British authenticity of the North of Ireland, she pronounced it to be ‘as British as Finchley’, her own constituency in England. She could as easily have said the same of … Read more

Telling it our way. Essays in gender history

Mary Cullen (Arlen House, €25) ISBN 9780905223872 This book is a journey of discovery for both author and reader. Beginning with Maria Luddy’s dutiful summary of Cullen’s articles, we are introduced to Jane Austen’s views regarding history, which apparently consisted of ‘the quarrels of popes and kings . . . and hardly any women at … Read more

The dynamics of war and revolution: Cork City, 1916–1918

John Borgonovo (Cork University Press, €39) ISBN 9781909005822 After a slow start, local histories of the Irish revolution have multiplied over the past fifteen years, with monographs on Sligo, Longford, Limerick and Clare, as well as wider-ranging regional studies, chapters in the massive county volumes of interdisciplinary essays from Geography Publications, more or less ‘popular’ … Read more

Friends in high places: Ulster’s resistance to Irish Home Rule, 1912–14

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

Irish Gothic Architecture: construction, decay and reinvention edited by Roger Stalley

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