Richard Reed, Paramilitary Loyalism: Identity and Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015) Alan F. Parkinson, A Difficult Birth: The Early Years of Northern Ireland, 1920–5 (Dublin: Eastwood, 2020) As preparation for a guest lecture I gave at the University of…
Category: Reviews
Book reviews of works about Irish history.
Two Northern Irish book reviews:
Review of The Border by Diarmaid Ferriter
The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics Diarmaid Ferriter Profile Books London A combination of the Decade of Commemoration in Ireland and the shenanigans around a Brexit deal have led to a renewed focus on the…
Book Review: Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World 1918-1923
Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World 1918-1923 Maurice Walsh Faber & Faber So much has been published about the Irish revolutionary period (1910-1923) over the course of the last few years that one has to be selective about…
Link
My review of Oscar Wilde’s Elegant Republic: Transformation, Dislocation and Fantasy in Fin-de-siècle Paris by David Charles Rose has just been published online and will be included in the next issue (26.3) of Irish Studies Review.
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Review of Unapproved Routes by Peter Leary
I saw this advertised somewhere recently and as it seemed relevant to my teaching about Northern Ireland at the minute I ordered it and read it. It’s an attractively produced little volume with elegant typesetting and a number of well…
The Red Hand of Ulster by George A. Birmingham:
A Review
My attention was first called to Ulster-born writer George A. Birmingham by a review of his novel The Major’s Candlesticks on the Reading 1900–1950 blog. That novel is a comedy set in the aftermath of the Irish War of Independence…
Aside
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From one review of Ireland and the British Empire (which I’ve just ordered from amazon.co.uk):
Apparently de Valera was furious with Costello when he announced, in 1948, that the newly declared Republic would be leaving the Commonwealth, shortly before India and Pakistan announced that, as republics, they would stay in, on just the sort of terms as de Valera had wanted.
Full book details: Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series), edited by Kevin Kenny (OUP, 2006)
Book Review: Vanished Kingdoms, by Norman Davies
I bought this book on a whim, partly because I guessed (correctly) that it would have something in it about the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is a casual interest of mine. Judging by what I’ve found on the internet, the book…
Book review: Acts of Union and Disunion, by Linda Colley
I bought this on a whim last week and have now almost finished reading it. It’s based on the BBC Radio 4 radio series of the same name, which dealt with the various acts and processes that have either bound…
My top books on Irish history
There are a lot of books on Irish history, and the current Decade of Commemoration has prompted a flood of new ones. Here’s my choice of a few of those that have been around for a while but are still…