LEEANN LANE UCD Press €30 ISBN 9781739086381 Reviewed by Susan Byrne Susan Byrne is a Research Ireland Post-doctoral Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. Mary MacSwiney—labelled a harridan, an unruly woman and incorrigible by her detractors—has up to this point generally been remembered as a vocal, difficult woman with strong, intransigent opinions. Her republican views and … Read more
ANGELA BYRNE Royal Irish Academy €30 ISBN 9781802050455 Reviewed by Pauric Travers Pauric Travers is president emeritus of St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra. Irish historiography has not always had a happy experience of large, multi-disciplinary projects. The Royal Irish Academy’s Irish Historic Towns Atlas series is a notable exception. Ireland joined the European Towns Atlas initiative … Read more
CATRIONA KENNEDY Oxford University Press £99 ISBN 9780198899532 Reviewed by Sylvie Kleinman Sylvie Kleinman is Visiting Research Fellow, Department of History, Trinity College, Dubin. This book opens with two women viewing themselves (in private letters) as quite capable of navigating the age’s intense ideological conflicts, even if held back from meaningful action. Martha McTier, wife … Read more
IAN STEWART Princeton University Press $39.95 ISBN 9780691222516 Reviewed by Mark Williams Of late there has been a tendency to assign the ‘Celtic’ to that pile in the scrapheap of ideas marked ‘worse than useless’. So murky is the concept, so contradictorily deployed across politics, historiography, archaeology and literature, that some have argued that it … Read more
By Daragh Fitzgerald Turning and turning in the widening gyre, it is tempting to escape to the Otherworld, where the ‘Other Crowd’ reside, while ours is upside down and the top keeps spinning. Yeats believed in the existence of fairies, as does my niece, who recently told me she saw some at the bottom of … Read more