Search results for ""lilliput press""

The four volumes of spokesman and strategist Alastair Campbell’s diaries were a publishing sensation.As British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s right-hand man, former journalist and political analyst Campbell played a critical role in every aspect of New Labour strategy. Charting the course of British government from July 1994 to August 2003, Campbell¹s relentlessly honest, often controversial, occasionally brutal, and always razor-sharp commentary has drawn critical acclaim from around the world. This newly edited one-volume edition focuses on one of the Blair government’s biggest successes, the Northern Ireland peace process. From the high of the Good Friday agreement and devolution in Northern Ireland, to the deadly lows of the Manchester and Omagh bombings, The Irish Diaries explores the tensions, all-night talks, adrenalin-fuelled negotiations and heady personality clashes that are such an intrinsic part of democratic politics. Newly annotated and fully revised by Campbell and featuring commissioned material by key figures in the Irish peace process such as former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern,Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell himself, The Irish Diaries is invaluable for readers with an interest in Irish history.

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Inspired by his passionate interest in Ireland's architectural heritage and concern for its preservation, The Irish Aesthete culminates the writings and photography of Robert O'Byrne to showcase Ireland's historic architecture.

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Habitat follows seven neighbours over the course of a surreal and life-changing week as their mid-century apartment building in Oslo begins to inexplicably break down around them.

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Pure Filth, Aidan Mathews’ fifth volume of poetry, follows upon Windfalls (Dolmen, 1977), Minding Ruth (Gallery, 1983), According to the Small Hours (Cape, 1998) and Strictly No Poetry (Lilliput, 2017). At its heart, the collection is about reflections on a career and sustained loves for people, God and art, with themes threaded throughout such as the pandemic, suburban Dublin, Irish landscape and history and the Holocaust. His critic and biographer David Wheatley says: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that Mathews does not have themes so much as obsessions. If his Catholic faith provides the ground base for all his work, sexuality, mental illness and the Holocaust recur in poem after poem, stitching together the quotidian and the extreme … Synthesizing the sexual, the sacred, and the secular, Mathews’ poetry is a testament of great personal power, answerable to the cloister and the locked ward, the social lepers and the captains of the ship of state.’ (Irish Poetry, Wake Forest 2017)

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Fierce Love is a compelling and candid biography of Cork-born theatre pioneer (1918-2006) Mary O’Malley, founder-director of Belfast’s Lyric Players Theatre from 1951 to 1981. Neé Hickey, Mary went to Loreto Secondary School in Navan, Co. Meath, writing and directing her first play, The Lost Princess, before living with her mother in Dublin. There she became a key member of the New Theatre Group, immersed in the city’s social and cultural life and joining the Irish Society for Intellectual Freedom. On 14 September 1947 Mary married Armagh-born psychiatrist Pearse O’Malley, later moving to Belfast’s Derryvolgie Avenue off the Malone Road. There she formed a fifty-seat studio theatre above the stables and created Belfast Lyric Players Theatre, a company of actors and artists who were to put on 140 plays over seventeen years on a stage only ten-foot wide, asserting a broad Irish and European culture. W.B Yeats, twenty-six of whose plays were performed, was her standard-bearer. In 1952 she was elected to Belfast Corporation as an Irish Labour Party councillor, and in 1957 she founded the literary magazine Threshold, which enjoyed a thirty-year lifespan. Her other activities included running a drama school, an art gallery and music academy, while raising a family of three. As she battled conservatism, a socialist and nationalist in a Unionist city, this courageous and tenacious woman transformed Belfast with her playhouse — Liam Neeson and Ciarán Hinds were among her protégées — expanding her repertoire and bridging the political quagmire of the sixties to build a permanent 300-seater Lyric Players theatre, which opened with Yeats’s Cuchulain Cycle in October 1968. Her fierce will survived the Troubles, ensuring that her broad-based community theatre never had to close its doors. Her vision was posthumously crowned by the 2011 Lyric Theatre building overlooking the Lagan. Fierce Love celebrates these achievements, chronicling a resourceful and controversial individual, who swam against the tide of populism and sectarianism to establish an independent academy for actors and artists in a tireless quest for imaginative freedom and excellence. Mary O’Malley’s life was complex, and her legacy enduring.

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This novel by Maylis Besserie, the first of her Irish trilogy, shows us Samuel Beckett at the end of his life in 1989, living in Le Tiers-Temps retirement home. It is as if Beckett has come to live in one of his own stage productions, peopled with strange, unhinged individuals, waiting for the end of days. Yell, Sam, If You Still Can is filled with voices. From diary notes to clinical reports to daily menus, cool medical voices provide a counterpoint to Beckett himself, who reflects on his increasingly fragile existence. He remains playful, rueful, and aware of the dramatic irony that has brought him to live in the room next door to Winnie, surrounded by grotesques like Hamm or Lucky, abandoned by his wife Suzanne who died before him. Besserie delights in Beckett’s bilingualism and plays back and forth between the francophone and anglophone properties of language, summoning James Joyce as Beckett reminisces about evenings the two spent together singing, talking and drinking. Largely written in the library of the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Besserie has kept the hum of Irish voices throughout this work. Yell, Sam, If You Still Can won the “Goncourt du premier roman”, the prestigious French literary prize for first time novelists, just before the country went into lockdown. Besserie is now planning a further two novels that will explore the links between Ireland and France and is touted as the new star of the French literary world. Financial Times Book of the Year 2022

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Professor Eda Sagarra, born in 1933, has been significant and influential figure in Irish and European academic policy-making, contributing to the early development of the Erasmus scheme. Now, aged nearly 88, this memoir gives striking evidence of her self-discipline and formidable energy. This substantial memoir by one of the foremost female academics in Ireland starts with Sagarra's own perspective on committing her life story to history during the pandemic lockdown of 2020: The following memoir recalls for those born in the present century and schooled without the strong sense of Irish history, which defined our people from the Great Famine of the 1840s until recent times, what it was like to grow up as a woman in the twentieth century and seek a career in a man's world. It tries to re-capture as much what it felt like to the person experiencing it as what was happening in society. Younger people today who read of the restrictions to which women were subject in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, will find it difficult to comprehend why our generation and the one that followed ours didn't challenge them. But probably the greatest contrast between the Ireland of then and now was the room for manoeuvre - or rather the absence of it. Today our lives are premised on a constantly changing world. Ireland is more connected across the globe than ever it was. Today most people are mobile. The Ireland when I was young was in almost every respect a static, hierarchical and paternalist society, one in which the accident of your birth would generally determine your whole life. No life is representative, but every person's experience is unique and worth recording for those who come after us. A south Dublin convent girl, Sagarra probes childhood and family, schooling, and UCD -with a perceptive commentary on the Ireland of the 1930s and 1940s. Her remarkable memory and shrewd eye for detail present at times a painfully honest account of family and in the upper middle-class world of Catholic south Dublin, revealing the profound influence of Europe during her postgraduate years in post-war Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Running through this forensic account of her academic life is a bitter awareness of the constant if subtle barriers to female advancement. For contemporary critics reconstructing the history of gender equality in Ireland and for readers of feminist history, this makes for essential reading. Her description of retirement since 1997 is colourful, poignant and revealing, and her reflections on old age and youth resonate.

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As I step out of the conservatory facing North, supported by my pusher, the first that catches my eye is the dying Sycamore which escapes death every year by producing a healthy crop of leaves, but it looks so decrepit that surely it can't pull that trick yet again. -1 April, 2020 In his eighty-eighth year, John Boorman uses his time in lockdown to reflect on the splendour of the surrounding nature of County Wicklow. Coccooning with his daughter and son among the hills of Annamoe, Boorman chronicles his daily walks and observations of the trees on his estate, writing with heightened appreciation of the beauties of his eyrie using only one eye and one finger. Poetry flows from his pen as he sits chairbound among his trees and flora: sycamores, limes, beech, oak, redwood, shrubs and flowers, birdsong and shifting skies are luminously recorded as the world falls silent. With illustrations by Susan Morley, this slim but meditative volume is a remarkable narrative by the creator of The Emerald Forest, Excalibur and Deliverance - a swansong like no other.

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Kevin Boyle (1943–2010) was one of the world’s great human rights lawyers. In a career that lasted decades and spanned continents, he tackled issues ranging from freedom of the press to terrorism to minority rights. This compelling account of Kevin Boyle’s life and work is a remarkable tale of how a taxi driver’s son from Northern Ireland inspired the human rights movement around the world. Born in Newry in 1943, Boyle attended Queen’s University Belfast in the early 1960s, beginning to teach law in 1966. He was a co-founder of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and the People’s Democracy, mediated during the 1981 hunger strikes and helped forge the basis for the agreement that ended the Troubles. His ideas, endorsed in a previously unrevealed conversation Margaret Thatcher had with Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald, provided much of the intellectual underpinning for the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. He was the lead lawyer in the case that decriminalized homosexuality in Northern Ireland, which then led to its decriminalization in the Irish Republic and other countries. Through a series of landmark cases at the European Court of Human Rights, he left an enduring mark on international human rights law, campaigning against apartheid in South Africa and repression in Turkey. He also played a critical role as the senior advisor to Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, during 9/11 and was involved in shaping the international response. He also led the campaign to support Salman Rushdie after the writer was targeted by Iran’s ayatollahs in 1989. Kevin Boyle was central in founding human rights law centres at universities from Ireland and Britain to Brazil and Japan. Though he was a towering figure, his personal story is not well known. Now, based on years of research, thousands of documents, and scores of interviews, former CNN correspondent Mike Chinoy has crafted the compelling life story of a remarkable Irishman.

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Ethna MacCarthy (1903-59) was a Scholar and a First-Class Moderator at Trinity College Dublin where she taught languages in the thirties and forties before studying medicine. Perhaps best known to posterity for her relationship with Samuel Beckett and appearance in several of his writings, including the play Krapp's Last Tape, she also had a remarkable influence on a number of writers such as Denis Johnston and Con Leventhal, who she later married. Found among Leventhal's papers when he died were MacCarthy's overlooked work, revealing a highly intelligent and culturally sophisticated poet. This collection, published here for the first time, unearths an exceptionally rich and intriguing body of work by a remarkable woman who was ahead of her time. MacCarthy played an important and creative part of a cosmopolitan and free-thinking post-Independence Dublin, publishing translations from Spanish and German poets before developing a highly distinctive style of her own. Her poetry contains exposed lunar and death-haunted landscapes, tales of multifaceted women, and subversive ideas around femininity. Her work highlights a gifted translator who artfully captures the feeling evoked by the original languages. According to Denis Johnston `she has never been shy, can be frank, and outspoken to a degree, is absolutely fearless, intolerant of mediocrity and finds it difficult to suffer fools gladly'. MacCarthy merits reappraisal as an intellectual presence in an age that did not often promote, if acknowledge at all, the woman's voice. This unique collection of Ethna MacCarthy's poems is published as an innovative first step in establishing her as one of the outstanding Irish poets of the mid-20th century.

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In From Lucifer to Lazarus: A Life on the Left, Mick O'Reilly shares his experiences as a politician and trade unionist and his unwavering thoughts and insights on controversial, complex issues. O'Reilly discovered socialism and militant trade unionism in the early 1960s when he joined the National Union of Vehicle Builders. He went on to join the committee of the Irish Communist Party in 1967 and the Dublin Housing Action Committee, and helped establish Connolly Youth. He took part in strikes against the European Economic Community and negotiated for protection for car workers. This book explores the power struggles and negotiations that O'Reilly has faced throughout his career, without generalities or truisms. After a party dispute in 1977, O'Reilly was employed by the Transport and General Workers' Union, and in 1979 negotiated a huge equal pay claim. Later, O'Reilly's Labour Left group sparked reform within the Labour Party, establishing that its leader must be elected by its members. O'Reilly was even suspended from the Party for a time before the charges against him were proven to be untrue, and he was reinstated in 2004. Despite navigating a career filled with adversity, O'Reilly remains decent, honest and humble. The authenticity of From Lucifer to Lazarus: A Life on the Left emphasises these often overlooked values, setting itself apart as a unique, intimate read. The foreword is written by Gene Kerrigan of The Independent.

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Paddy Rossmore: Photography records half a century of the travels made by Lord Rossmore and his companions the Knight of Glin, Desmond FitzGerald, and Mariga Guinness of the Irish Georgian Society. The visual record made by Rossmore provides a unique archive dedicated to preserving the landscape of a bygone era. With accompanying essays by fine art historian Robert O'Byrne, Rossmore's photographs capture the bittersweet beauty of an uncertain era for Ireland's architectural heritage, with many of his subjects now fallen to ruin, and others enjoying restoration and new life in modernized Ireland.

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1 January 2018 will be the 250th anniversary of Maria Edgeworth's birth. Valerie Pakenham's sparkling new selection of over four hundred letters, many hitherto unpublished, will help to celebrate her memory. Born in England, she was brought to live in Ireland at the age of fourteen and spent most of the rest of her life at the family home at Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford. Encouraged by her remarkable father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, whose memoirs she edited, she became, in turn, famous for her children's stories, her practical guides to education and her novels - or, as she preferred to call them, `Moral Tales'. By 1813, when visiting London, she was, as Byron testified, as great a literary lion as he had been the season before, and she was hugely admired by fellow novelists Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen. Maria Edgeworth's posthumous fame has dwindled and only her first novel, Castle Rackrent (1800), a brilliant burlesque account of the Irish squirearchy, is still widely read. She was, however, a prolific and fascinating letter writer. She insisted that her letters were for private consumption only, but after her death, her stepmother and half-sisters produced a private memoir for friends using carefully selected extracts. Their literary quality was spotted by Augustus Hare, whose shortened version, The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, appeared in 1894. In the 1970s Maria's great great niece, Christina Colvin edited Maria Edgeworth's Letters from England and Maria Edgeworth in France & Switzerland. No one, however, has revisited fully Maria's original letters from the place she loved and knew best: Ireland. From 1825, Maria's letters reflect sixty years of Irish history, from the heady days of Grattan's Parliament, through the perils of the 1798 Rebellion to the rise of O'Connell and the struggle for Catholic Emancipation. In old age, she worked actively to alleviate the Great Famine and wrote her last story to raise money aged 82. A treasure trove of stories, humour, local and high-level gossip, her letters show the extraordinary range of her interests: history, politics, literature and science. Maria almost single-handedly took over the management of her family estate and restored it to solvency. Her later letters brim with delight at these practical undertakings and her affection for the local people she worked with. Two of her half-sisters and her stepmother were gifted artists, and Valerie Pakenham has been able to use many of their unpublished drawings and sketches to illustrate this book.

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These reflective essays about Déon’s life and experiences in the west of Ireland describe the colourful and varied personalities that the French novelist has come across since he and his family moved there in the mid 1970s. From his friendship with John McGahern and Ulick O’Connor to Tim, the sturdy old postman who prefers his wind-blown country round to retirement in sunny California, Horseman, Pass By! is peopled with fascinating characters and encounters. Taking its title from Yeats, this work is an affectionate portrait of the Irish and a lament for a fading country that has been changed by new wealth and altered values. Déon’s Horseman, Pass By! is an elegant memoir about a beautiful landscape and its inhabitants and forms a touching and amusing tribute to his adopted country.

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The original Seven Deadly Sins are still among us, wearing modern dress. In this lavish, stunningly illustrated modern interpretation, the victims take revenge on their tormentors. The weak become strong and the powerful weak. The stories are humorous, violent and erotic; a celebration of the joy of sinning and of taking revenge. Each story, each sin, is different in setting, character and mood. Each sin in turn is inspected, tested and described in spare and unsparing prose. In each, the sin and the sinner are shown as malevolent, the victim undeserving of their state. This graphic fable is conceived as a collection illustrating Envy, Pride, Avarice, Sloth, Gluttony, Anger and Lust. The drawings and collages illuminate the foibles and wickedness described; from perpetrator to victim, no-one can hide

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YEATS 150 is a collection of essays, many of them illustrated, commemorating the life and work of Irish poet and Nobel Laureate, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). The book, dedicated to Seamus Heaney, is divided into a number of sections: Academic Essays; Plays; the Yeats family; Scholarly Essays; Yeats Poetry Prizes and, appropriately, the topographical ‘Sligo’, by Sligo natives and visitors to the International Yeats Summer School. The book includes Helen Vendler’s tribute to Seamus Heaney; essays on Yeats’ poetry and plays; on his wife George, his children Anne and Michael, his contemporary, AE, and on the Sligo landscape that so influenced his imagination. It also details his elaborately crafted book designs. A section, appropriately titled Tír na nÓg, includes pieces by the late T.R. Henn, Vincent Buckley and Alec King, connecting to the post-1945 writing on W.B. Yeats. This remarkably wide-ranging collection honours the poet Yeats and those who have lectured and tutored across the world on the man and his work. The US, Canada, UK, Hungary, Japan, New Zealand and Australia are represented in the essays. The thirty-six contributors include former Yeats Summer School Directors: Helen Vendler, Denis Donoghue and James Pethica, Ann Margaret Daniels, as well as Patrick M. Keane, Harvard professors Deirdre Toomey and Daniel Albright, Yeats Annual editor Warwick Gould, publisher Colin Smythe, professor and director of Otago University, New Zealand, Peter Kuch, Tokyo professor Tomoko Iwatsubo, biographer Ann Saddlemyer, critics Lucy McDiarmid, Bruce Stewart and Martin Mansergh: in all, a glittering gathering of writers lend weight to this important commemorative and historical work.

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In this lyrical and compelling collection of tales of the quotidian, John A. Ryan paints a sincere picture of Ireland, it’s environment and people. His delicate awareness of the world around him is reflected in every paragraph of these poetic and contemplative pieces. Each is infused with a sense of mindfulness, slowness and the almost divine nature of the small and the commonplace, reminding the reader of the sacredness of life at the heart of the universe. Some of these twenty prose pieces, scattered across rural and small-town Ireland, France and the Mediterranean littoral, have already appeared in the pages of the Irish Press. Most are hitherto unseen. They partake of Benedict Kiely, Donal Ryan and the deep traditions of Irish traditional rural literature.

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These twelve masterful short stories are by one of Ireland’s leading practitioners of the art (previous collections include Adventures in a Bathyscope, 1998, and Lipstick on the Host, 1992). Mathews is a writer worthy of Joyce, whose condensed language conveys learning, sophistication, true feeling and poignancy. The range of subject matter is conveyed in the story titles: ‘Charlie Chaplin’s Wishbone’, ‘Access’, ‘Barber-Surgeons’, ‘Waking a Jew’, ‘Cuba’, ‘The Seven Affidavits of Saint-Artaud’, ‘A Woman from Walkinstown’, ‘In the Form of Fiction’, ‘The Logos of the Zoo’, and ‘Information for the User’. The stories are set in Ireland and principally in Dublin of the 1960s. Characterisation is rich and the dialogue lively and expressive, while the understated dramas and emotions of the tales themselves subtly washing over the reader. The verbal flair of Aidan Mathews is second to none, and the seriousness and the gravity of his contemplations a welcome counterweight to our desiccated, Anglo-American digital culture. This gathering marks a welcome return of a major voice in Irish literature, unpublished since the 1990s.

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Here, name by name, parish by parish, province by province, Kevin Myers details Ireland’s intimate involvement with one of the greatest conflicts in human history, the First World War of 1914 to 1918, which left no Irish family untouched. With this gathering of his talks, unpublished essays and material distilled from The Irish Times and elsewhere, Myers lays out the grounds of his research and findings in Connaught, Leinster, Munster and Ulster. He revisits the main theatres of war in Europe – The Somme, Ypres and Verdun, the war at sea and Gallipoli. He documents these bloody engagements through the lives of those involved, from Dublin to Cork, Sligo to Armagh, to the garrison towns of Athy, Limerick, Mullingar and beyond. In Ireland’s Great War Myers uncoils a vital counter-narrative to the predominant readings in nationalist history, revealing the complex and divided loyalties of a nation coming of age in the early twentieth century. This remarkable historical record pieced together the neglected shards of Ireland’s recent past and imparts a necessary understanding of the political process that saw Sinn Féin’s electoral victory in 1918 and the founding of the Irish Free State. By honouring Ireland’s forgotten dead on the centenary of the Great War. Myers enables a rediscovery of purpose that will speak to future generations.

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A collection of stunning images of the everyday birds of Dublin City. Cormorants, ducks, gulls, swans, herons, pigeons. Caught on the wing, at rest, in play, feeding and preening. From the Malahide Estuary to the Blessington Basin and Dublin’s parks and canals: each one rendered in exhilirating detail. Nature on display here in its wonder and glory by a master of the lens, Ray Beggan.

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The family firm, once regarded as a transitory phenomenon on the way to a more sophisticated model of business organization, is now recognized internationally as an enduring element in modern industrial capitalism. Collen offers an informed and accessible discussion of a significant family-run institution which has operated throughout the island of Ireland since its foundation. The author makes use of untapped archival sources to analyse the fortunes of the company and illuminate the changing political, economic and social realities that shaped the context for its development. He explores how a family enterprise adapted to the far-reaching transformation of politics and society in Ireland over a period of two centuries. The Collen family business has survived economic depression, two World Wars, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland with a combination of resilience and business acumen. This book presents a distinctive Irish perspective on the evolution and persistence of family business, while casting new light on the commercial development of Dublin during the last two hundred years. Collen will be of use to scholars of modern Irish history, economic development, architecture, civil engineering, business and public policy and will be invaluable for all those with a professional interest in Irish business and family enterprise.

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These eleven stories by Desmond Hogan, his first publication since Larks’ Eggs: New and Selected Stories (2005), collect newly minted shards of experience focused on the lives of the dreamers and marginalized who populate his imagined worlds. They range in time and place from France, Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century to Ireland of the 1950s and the present day. Their concerns are fragility and identity expressed through the outer semblances of dress and deportment, and inner realities of involuntary memory and the retrieval of shared pasts. Close observation of nature combines with psychological unveilings, much of it in the form of erotic reverie. This bricolage of melded history and a fragmented modernism renders truth-to-experience like no other contemporary voice.

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This volume sheds new light on the life and works of Jack B. Yeats, the talented painter and poet too often overshadowed by his older brother William, through a collection of previously published and unpublished letters from John Butler Yeats to his son Jack, and from Jack to his father, John Quinn, 'The Man from New York', and Sarah Purser. Introduced by Bruce Stewart of the University of Coleraine, the work includes essays on Jack B. Yeats by editor and Sligo-man Declan J. Foley, organizer of three John Butler Yeats seminars in Chestertown, upstate New York (JBY's burial ground), as well as by other scholars of Jack B. Yeats.

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The Land Question has always been predominant in Ireland. According to forecasts, there will be as few as 15,000 farmers in twenty years’ time. As the Irish rural image undergoes radical transformation, this timely, informative, vigorously argued book will be necessary reading for those working in rural development, food production, housing, transport, heritage and conservation, to say nothing of those who simply care about Ireland’s future. Land Matters concerns social and ecological change, the underlying results of structural and policy decisions made in Brussels or Dublin and their impact on the ground. It addresses the following themes: globalization and the forces that shape society; the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy), and why it has been reformed; social inequality; REPS (the Rural Environment Protection Scheme) and its impact; survival strategies in everyday life (farm households and diversification); green capitalism; landscape, heritage and the ‘politics of perception’; nitrate pollution; migration; contrasting rural visions (housing in the country, ‘clean’ food); and views of a region – west Cork – in which competing claims are made by farmers, hoteliers, conservationists and second-home owners. Key organizations such as Teagasc, the IFA, An Taisce and Organic Trust are also examined and profiled. Land matters permeate all our lives, from our supermarket shelves to our television screens and studies, from our boardrooms to our streets, dwellings, communities and belief systems. No one will be untouched by the issues raised in this pioneering, analytic work.

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Controversies are high drama: in them people speak lines as colourful and passionate as any recited on stage. In the years before 1916, public battles were fought in Ireland over French paintings, Dublin slum children, and theatrical censorship. Controversy was ‘popular,’ wrote George Moore, especially ‘when accompanied with the breaking of chairs’. In her new book, Lucy McDiarmid gives a lively account of these and other controversies. They offered to everyone direct or vicarious involvement in public life: the question they articulated was not ‘Irish Ireland or English Ireland’ but whose ‘Irish Ireland’ would dominate when independence was finally achieved. The Irish Art of Controversy recovers the histories of ‘the man who died for the language,’ Father O’Hickey, who defied the bishops in his fight for the Irish language; Lady Gregory and Bernard Shaw’s defence of the Abbey Theatre against Dublin Castle; the 1913 ‘Save the Dublin Kiddies’ campaign, in which priests attacked socialists over custody of Catholic children; and the contested Hugh Lane Bequest to Dublin of thirty-nine Impressionist masterpieces. Roger Casement forms the subject of the last chapter, which offers the definitive commentary on the long-lasting controversy over his diaries. In its original treatment of what Yeats called ‘intemperate speech’, The Irish Art of Controversy suggests new ways of thinking about modern Ireland and about controversy’s bluff, bravado and improvisational flair.

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PEGGY O’BRIEN grew up in western Massachusetts, where she now lives with her husband. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. After graduating from Mount Holyoke College, she moved to Ireland and studied at University College Dublin and Trinity College, where she taught for the better part of twenty years. Her poems have appeared in publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Yale Review, The Southwest Review and Poetry Ireland Review. As well as being the editor of The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry 1967-2000, she is the author of Writing Lough Derg: from Carleton to Heaney. She travels often in Ireland, where she has a daughter and three granddaughters.

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This superbly incisive, comprehensive history of the Irish women’s movement from the 1860s to the twenty-first century – appearing for the first time in paperback – shows how a network of constituent organizations and individuals was transformed into an engine of social change. While feminism is a major intellectual and political tradition in Ireland, it has been misrepresented and misunderstood in mainstream Irish studies. This survey of key historical and contemporary perspectives redresses that imbalance. It demonstrates how the women’s movement fundamentally challenged established interpretations of the way in which modern Irish society has evolved over time, creating new theoretical directions in Irish studies.

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Born in Dublin in 1798 and educated at Trinity College, James Henry was a controversially humane doctor, a passionate scholar of Virgilian manuscripts, and a lifelong interrogator of Christianity. More than a century after James Henry’s death, Christopher Ricks came upon his poems – printed but unpublished – in the Cambridge University Library. Within these volumes Ricks discovered poetry ‘unaffectedly direct, sinewy, seriously comic. And brave.’ Henry’s convictions and his humour, his idiosyncrasies and his courage, come through in work that, Ricks writes, ‘has an integrity, a consistency, for all its engaging diversity of topic and tone’. With the publication of the Selected Poems of James Henry, the world at large can hear the voice of a remarkable poet.

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The Sway of Winter tells the story of Birgit, a young Scandinavian woman who has moved to the island of Inis Breac to paint, and to recover from a suffocating relationship. Geoff, an English widower, shattered by years of hard drinking after his wife’s drowning, runs the local bookshop. Birgit visits Africa in a quest to decide her future in working among the deprived, but finds there only a mirror of an inner poverty. This finely wrought debut novel is a potent revelation of how lives converge in the passage between trauma and resolution, leading to emotional renewal. With a fresh and unusual voice new to Irish fiction, Orla Murphy captivates the reader with her passionate and nuanced narrative.

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The Figure in the Cave selects the prose of one of Ireland’s foremost contemporary poets – part autobiography, part criticism, part self-commentary – a gathering, from the mid-century to the present day, that marks a lifetime’s critical engagement with literature in both Europe and America. In the title essay Montague looks over his career as a writer; in others he describes a coming-of-age in Ulster, explores his own poetics, and appraises Goldsmith, Carleton, George Moore, Joyce and Beckett, MacNeice, Clarke, Kavanagh, Hewitt and MacDiarmid. Pieces on American literature include a vignette of Saul Bellow, a review of Lowell and an intimate sketch of Berryman. To conclude, the author examines the impact of international modern poetry on Irish writing. Humorous, forceful, impressionistic, enriched with personal and political observation, this dialogue between early and later selves traces the development of the boy from Garvaghey to the figure in the cave, and reveals the workings of a fine poet’s mind.

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This essay in autobiography opens in Eyrecourt, east Galway, and describes an early schooling at Rockwell and the experiences of a Jesuit novice at Emo Court, Co. Laois, and Rathfarnham. John O’Meara read classical studies at University College, Dublin, and after a spell of teaching at Clongowes Wood left in 1942 on a travelling studentship to Oxford, where he gained a doctorate three years later. In 1947 he married Odile de Montfort, whom he met in Dublin. The Singing-Masters is written with singular clarity and leaves an abiding impression of Ireland between the wars – the hothouse atmosphere of a diocesan seminary, the lure of the Irish countryside (Eyrecourt in summer, Tullabeg in winter), a fledgling state increasingly dominated by the Church – drawn into perspective by a visit to Lourdes and by the author’s self-questionings. In wartime Oxford, where he met Lutyens, Waugh and Belloc, Dodds and Father D’Arcy, O’Meara comes of spiritual and intellectual age, linking Ireland once more to the traditions of theological Europe, and finding his singing-masters in Augustine, Eriugena and the Neo-Platonists. With this quiet celebration of selfhood, and in its limpid recall of time gone, John O’Meara has created a classic of its kind

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This comprehensive directory lists historic locations in Dublin on a street-by-street basis, describing events during the tumultuous decade from the 1913 Dublin Lockout, through the 1916 Easter Rising and Irish War of Independence, until the end of the Irish Civil War. It is being reissued by The Lilliput Press with an extensively revised and expanded introduction by the author, to better contextualize the events of the period covered. Entries have been supplemented with further research. It is uniquely illustrated from a Dublin City Archive postcard collection.

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Padraig O'Malley's Perils & Prospects of a United Ireland presents the definitive study of the questions around the future of Northern Irish politics, including the idea of reunification. Focusing on the topics of the Northern Ireland Protocol, the Good Friday Agreement, Brexit, Unionism, Nationalism, the economics of potential reunification or continued partition, and the wide range of Northern Irish identities, this work encompasses the most up-to-date and considered review of political actions so far. A must-read for those interested in the future of Northern Ireland.

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It’s the thought that counts. So, while society has changed, the need for thoughtfulness, courtesy and good manners has not. What is the etiquette for internet use, emails and mobile phone calls? How does one handle the delicate politics of flat-sharing? What are the rules for meeting through a dating agency? Mind Your Manners provides effective answers to these and many more dilemmas of modern decorum. Covering all situations – weddings, work, throwing a party, visits to a restaurant or theatre, driving – Robert O’Byrne gives witty and urbane advice on how best to behave with style in the twenty-first century. Here are practical tips for getting though Christmas with a smile on your face; being a good host ( how do you introduce Susan self-Effacing to Aileen Assured?); and dealing with a funeral (not a good time to network). Combing humorous but indispensable advice with hilarious cartoons from Merrily Harper, knowing correct conduct has never been easier

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This collection of essays examines core authors and texts. Written by scholars from a range of Irish third-level institutions, these essays provide introductions to less familiar authors and open up critical readings of established texts.

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This is a writer’s journal of his friendships, encounters and observations during the 1950s and 60s, describing relationships with Cork author Frank O’Connor, Patrick Kavanagh, Charles Cape (onetime governor of Strangeways Prison) and the remarkable Margaret Radford, baglady and acquaintance of Shaw, Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford, with her vivid experiences of the Great War. Peopled by the colourful characters met in his profession, Naughton also gives an intimate portrait of a marriage and the onset of death as he survives a coronary thrombosis. Limpid, candid and tellingly written, it delineates the struggles and triumphs of a migrant Irish writer living in the English provinces, with sharp insights into human behaviour.

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This work, whose full title is Life of Colman, son of Luachain, or Betha Colmain maic Luachain, is a thirteenth-century Life of a seventh-century saint Colman (who first gave Mullingar its name, ‘the wry mill’, An Muileann gCearr), written originally in Irish at Lynn monastery south of Mullingar, preserved at the Rennes Municipal Library in Brittany, and translated and published by Kuno Meyer in 1911. This Life provides one of the most important sources for the ecclesiastical, topographical, social and political history of life in the midlands during the Early Christian era. Next to the Tripartite Life of Patrick and the biographies of Colum Cille, it is the richest and fullest among the lives of Irish saints that have come down to us, replete with details of the daily life of the monasteries, their royal patrons and subjects, dwelling among miracle-workers, saints and demons in a land subject to the vagaries of plague, famine and war. Meyer’s translation and introduction to the Life form the core of the book, added to which is a preface by Leo Daly, an original essay review by J.C. MacErlean from Studies, and commentary by Father Paul Walsh and others, correcting and amending the original document. A glossary, an index of personal names, places and tribes, and bibliographic essay make up the text. Pages from the original manuscript, topographical photographs showing monastic remains and associated sites, as well as more recent iconography, furnish illustrations.

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The 12 stories collected here represent some of the best work of Martin Healy's short career. They are set in the city, the suburbs and the country, and they are peopled by the young, the middle-aged and the old.

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‘The devil was going around again and everyone knew because it was in the papers. An usherette in the Metropole saw him at An Apartment for Peggie, eating oranges in a brown trilby; two women in Clery’s Bargain Basement came upon him fingering cups in a highly suspicious manner; and The Evening Mail said pretty draper’s assistant, Lily Shine, nineteen, from Cabra West, was dancing with a fellow in a brown suit when she felt something funny, looked down, and fainted.’ In these unsettling tales of late 1940s Dublin, young Eily Doolin encounters the gentle foot-fetishist next door, the ‘Argentinian tango-dancer’ from Ballybough, the Jewish couple who introduce her to the delights of carrot cake and Chopin, the ‘simple’ boy who carries a secret hatred, and, in the climactic closing story, the devil himself. Along the way there are two murders, a suicide, and more illicit sex than Eily can comprehend. Ena May’s post-Emergency Dublin is at once recognizable and utterly unlike all previous literary versions of the city. Her gimlet-eyed narrator inhabits secret childhood places as well as the grown-up kitchens and parlours of ‘Blarney Park’, twitching the veil between public and private, street and home. Ena May has created a remarkable narrative voice, perfectly pitched between the knowing and the naïve, the compassionate and the sarcastic, the intrepid and the bewildered. A Close Shave with the Devil, fables of adults at play in a child’s world, is a tour de force of storytelling, and a remarkable début collection.

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This edition gathers all the articles and essays that Behan published in newspapers from 1951 to his death in 1964.The articles reveal a serious writer capable of great comic set pieces and amusing yarns as well as thoughtful reflections on cultural and historical issues.

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