By Joe Culley @TheRealCulls In October 1921, in the midst of the Treaty negotiations, a Pathé newsreel shown in Irish cinemas featured (on the intertitle) ‘Commandant McKeon’ wearing his IRA uniform while throwing in the sliotar for a match. This might seem innocuous except that, from the (still) governing British perspective at least, McKeon had … Read more
KEVIN O’ROURKE Pelican €20 ISBN 9780241398272 Reviewed by Eoin Dillon Eoin Dillon is a scholar of twentieth-century African history. Brexit has produced a crisis in the British body politic unparallelled since the Second World War. Suez in 1956, when France, the UK and Israel tried to re-seize the canal from the Egyptians and had to … Read more
MILTON C. TOBY University Press of Kentucky $29.95 ISBN 9780813176239 Reviewed by Dean Jobb Dean Jobb is the author of Empire of deception and teaches non-fiction writing at the University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia. On a bitterly cold night in February 1983, a band of armed and masked men descended on a stud … Read more
PATRICIA LYSAGHT ClareBooks €13.50 ISBN 9781999611613 Reviewed by Thomas O’Loughlin Thomas O’Loughlin is Professor of Historical Theology at the University of Nottingham. The historian, prior to any analysis, has to preserve the memory of the past, and in such a way that it is accessible to later times with as little damage from time’s passing … Read more
SARAH COVINGTON, VINCENT CAREY and VALERIE McGOWAN-DOYLE (eds) Routledge €40 ISBN 9780815373940 Reviewed by Simon Egan Simon Egan is a research fellow at the University of Glasgow. In 1500 the island of Ireland was, to most outside observers, a terra incognita. The land and seascape stretching from Mizen Head northwards through to Rathlin was controlled … Read more