More than concrete blocks: Dublin city’s twentieth-century buildings and their stories, volume I, 1900–40

ELLEN ROWLEY (ed.) Dublin City Council/Four Courts Press/University College Dublin €22.45 ISBN 9781902703442 Reviewed by: Mary Davies The population of Dublin city grew from just under 300,000 in 1900 to half a million half a century later, and More than concrete blocks is the first of three volumes commissioned by Dublin City Council Heritage Office … Read more

Enigmas of sacrifice: a critique of Joseph M. Plunkett and the Dublin insurrection of 1916

W.J. McCORMACK Michigan State University Press $29.95 ISBN 9781611861914 Reviewed by: Eoin Dillon After reading W.J. (Bill) McCormack’s account of intellectual life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and Britain, the 1916 Rising in Ireland and the role of the Plunkett family, particularly that of George Noble Plunkett and his better-known son, Joseph, military planner of … Read more

Art of the islands: Celtic, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon and Viking visual culture c. 450–1050

MICHELLE P. BROWN Bodleian Library £25 ISBN 9781851244461 Reviewed by: Peter Harbison The very first page of the Introduction of this book points out rightly that this is the first work to deal with the artistic development and cultural milieu of the whole ‘archipelago of islands’ comprising Britain and Ireland from the end of the … Read more