By Daniel Mulhall When the Swedish Academy announced its 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature, it opted for a writer who had produced what it described as ‘always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation’. The poet’s name was William Butler Yeats and his nation had … Read more
By Charles Lysaght The Kildare Street Club was well described by nationalist leader John Dillon as ‘the sacred ark of the covenant of Toryism; of the most benighted Toryism in Ireland’. Its members were drawn from the landed aristocracy and gentry, as well as from judges and leading figures in the pre-independence administration. Although the … Read more
By Donnacha Ó Beacháin For centuries neither Ireland nor Ukraine was on the world map but rather they were provinces or sub-units within the imperial structures that had conquered their peoples militarily. Britain and Russia feared that Ireland and Ukraine respectively would be used as a base for foreign attack, and this provided one of … Read more
By Elizabeth Malcolm The boycott in late 1880 of Captain Charles Boycott, the English-born agent for the earl of Erne’s Lough Mask estate in south-east Mayo, is still remembered today mainly because it introduced a useful new word into the English language. Historians writing about the 1879–82 Land War, such as Samuel Clark, J.S. Donnelly … Read more
By Clare O’Halloran ‘The stupendous power of steam has, within a very few years, annihilated all previous calculations of time and space.’ The sentiment of this breathless opening line of an all-but-forgotten 1844 history of Drogheda by the barrister and historian John D’Alton was a commonplace of the early age of steam transportation and especially … Read more