By Joe Culley @TheRealCulls The only thing bland about this young Irish woman was her name, Lilian Bland. Born in 1878 (in Kent, admittedly) to an affluent family with roots in Antrim, by the turn of the century she was living in Ireland and rebelling against convention in every way. She was, for example, working … Read more
BRENDAN SIMMS Allen Lane £30 ISBN 9781846142475 Reviewed by Geoffrey Roberts If you are going to challenge a cherished historical consensus you need cogent arguments and compelling evidence. Brendan Simms’s challenge to deeply entrenched interpretations of Hitler’s Weltanschauung is plausible and engaging but unconvincing. According to Simms, ‘Hitler’s principal preoccupation throughout his career was Anglo-America … Read more
JAMES DOHERTY Cork University Press €39 ISBN 9781782053606 Reviewed by Martin O’Donoghue Martin O’Donoghue is a lecturer in Irish and British history at Northumbria University. In 1935 George Dangerfield published The strange death of Liberal England—an attractive volume that explained the collapse of the Liberal Party in terms of major pre-war factors: the Conservative campaign … Read more
JOHN MULQUEEN Liverpool University Press £75 ISBN 9781789620641 Reviewed by Ruan O’Donnell Ruan O’Donnell is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Limerick. Given their centrality to matters pertaining to the recent ‘Long War’ and the burgeoning bibliography of that expansive topic, it is surprising how little has been published on the role of … Read more
RUTH A. CANNING Boydell Press £75 ISBN 9781783273270 Reviewed by Henry A. Jefferies Henry A. Jefferies is a research associate in history at Ulster University. Dr Canning uses the term ‘Old English’ explicitly to connote any descendants of English colonists who arrived in Ireland prior to 1541 (pp 2–3). She acknowledges that historians have ‘long … Read more