Claire Gogarty Clontarf Books £30 ISBN 9781782801702 Clontarf these days, to outsiders at least, seems no more than an amorphous part of the suburbs that stretch without interruption around Dublin Bay from Howth to Killiney. In the late eighteenth century, however, it was a small fishing base and one of the early bathing places close … Read more
James Graham Campbell Thames & Hudson £9.95 ISBN 9780500204191 Viking art is an illustrated study of the applied art of Scandinavia and the Scandinavian world in the period c. AD 800–1100. The subject is large in time-scale, in geographical area and in the range of decorated objects of differing scales and functions, materials, methods and … Read more
Marie-Thérèse Flanagan Boydell Press £25 ISBN 9781843838289 Historians of medieval Ireland tend to specialise, for example in ecclesiastical, legal, Anglo-Norman, Gaelic Irish or settlement history. Professor Marie-Thérèse Flanagan, however, displays an unparalleled breadth of expertise across almost all these divides. She sets the Irish experience in the context of developments both in England and in … Read more
Jean Manco Thames & Hudson £19.94 ISBN 9780500051788 ‘It is a tangled web our ancestors have woven’, Jean Manco writes. ‘For the general public the new views may not fit treasured national myths.’ The interplay between research agendas and politics is always fraught, especially when the topic is identity. Language barriers and nationalist ideology have … Read more
Darren McGettigan Four Courts Press £17.50 ISBN 9781846823848 This is an example of an expert book written by a self-confessed non-expert—and it is a resounding success. Darren McGettigan’s previous work has been focused firmly on the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the world of Red Hugh O’Donnell and the Donegal plantation. In a major departure … Read more