SHANE KENNY Gill Books €24.99 ISBN 9781804581865 REVIEWED BY Barry Walsh Barry Walsh is a solicitor and a former policy adviser at the Department of An Taoiseach. Political diaries and memoirs are an important source for historians, since they can often give a sense of the atmosphere that surrounded key events, years before official records … Read more
MARTIN DILLON Merrion Press €19.99 ISBN 9781785375415 REVIEWED BY Margaret Ward Margaret Ward is Hon. Senior Lecturer in History at Queen’s University, Belfast, and author of Rebel women: Cumann na mBan in Belfast and the Glens of Antrim 1914–1924 (Beyond the Pale Books, 2024). Martin Dillon is an investigative journalist whose exhaustive exploration of the … Read more
ROBERT HARRIS Penguin £15.99 ISBN REVIEWED BY Colum Kenny Colum Kenny is Professor Emeritus, DCU, and author of Dangerous ambition: the making of Éamon de Valera (Eastwood Books, 2024). My grand-aunt Josie from Newry would have approved. Robert Harris is unsparing when depicting Winston Churchill in his latest work of ‘fiction’. She too always blamed … Read more
CIARAN O’NEILL Oxford University Press £99 ISBN 9780192855428 REVIEWED BY Peter Gray Peter Gray is Professor of Modern Irish History at Queen’s University, Belfast. This is, as the author asserts, a book of ideas. At times insightful, at others provocative, it explores the nature(s) of power and its absence in the era of ‘Union Ireland’, … Read more