Search results for ""The Lilliput Press Ltd""

Margaret Atwood, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney and Salman Rushdie feature in this collection of over forty interviews with award-winning authors. This is a genre-crossing collection of interviews and essays that recounts in intimate detail encounters with many of the world’s foremost writers. Interspersed are photos as well as a charismatic commentary, provided by editor and veteran journalist Ciaran Carty, revealing a surprising, often unexpected interconnectedness between these otherwise distinct figures. Individually, these pieces provide a rare glimpse inside some of the world’s most creative minds; collectively, they address topics such as history, politics, sexuality, and class, while also reflecting the distinguished and wide-ranging career of one of Ireland’s leading critics and broadcasters. Filled with laugh-out-loud anecdotes, personal confessions, and passionate declarations, this book is the definitive collection for literature enthusiasts and aspiring writers alike.

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The Tottenham family is falling apart. There is no money to maintain the crumbling house and farm in County Westmeath, so decisions have to be made. Brothers Nick and Tony, with no prospect of a future in rural Ireland, make the long journey to their uncle’s ranch in Australia. As World War Two looms, the entire family signs up to fight: mathematician mother Eleanor calculates flight paths; sister Rose repairs radar masts in Lincolnshire; Nick and Tony, like thousands of others, enlist in Australia; even their ageing father Gerald signs up for duty in the Far East. Little does each foresee what terror, starvation and heartache lay ahead, and what it would take to survive. In a gripping narrative that spans four generations and encompasses the battlefields of Syria and Egypt, the Australian outback, night sorties over Germany, English airfields and the horrors of a Sumatran prison camp, this is a harrowing story of hardship and heroism, based on an Irish family’s experience.

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Intimacy with Strangers offers a dazzlingly original, thought-provoking approach to celebrity interviewing. Ciaran Carty draws upon a career involving many of the world’s leading writers, artists, actors and directors as they explore intimate concerns, ranging from love and rejection to the smallest physical sensations of pleasure and pain, and to the great issues of politics and war, God and atheism – the big and small of the human condition. Interweaving recent cultural and social history, Carty exposes unexpected affinities shared by his eclectic cast of subjects. Through chains of happenstance and six-degrees-of-separation, Intimacy with Strangers mirrors the cinematic cuts, fades and dissolves of its author’s sensibility as film critic and writer. By creating this magical memoir, Ciaran Carty offers an idiosyncratic portrait of a kaleidoscopic Ireland in a global setting.

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After the French and Dutch electorates decisively rejected the EU Constitution at the polls in 2005, the Irish delivered a resounding 'Third No' in June 2008, triggering a political earthquake in the capitals of Europe. Forcing the Irish to vote again in 2009 having given the 'wrong' answer reveals divergent visions of Europe's future. In this defining moment Another Europe? comes as a timely stimulus to debate about the future of the EU. Just as The Federalist papers of 1788 lent the stage to Publius at an equally pivotal time in the history of the United States of America, so his sister 'Publia', with her friend 'Lydia', jointly address the peoples of Europe on the future of their Continent. Their inspired exchanges contain the ideas of over seventy distinguished thinkers and political actors across the European Union. They expose two logically consistent if irreconcilable routes towards a democratically legitimate Europe. Authoritative and highly readable, Another Europe? aims to bridge academic and popular discourse and open up all the key issues, from law to environment, identity, citizenship, finance and foreign policy. It is essential for anyone who wishes to engage in Ireland's – and Europe's – great debate.

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In 1961, MJ Galvin, an Irish building contractor in London, brings over his kid brother, Tom, to join the family business. Educated, sensitive and naive, and destined for the seminary, Tom witnesses a killing, learns about dead men and the start in Camden Town, experiences drunken brawls and the excitement of dancehall nights in the Galtymore. He faces a decision that will shape his future: will he join his successful brother and make a fortune, or follow an inner voice towards the priesthood? The inner voice prevails, Tom enrolls as a seminarian, goes to Rome, becomes a monsignor and is tipped for a bishopric, only to renounce power and prestige, and be relegated to a quiet country parish disillusioned by the betrayal of principles within his Church as a new century dawns. This powerful family saga evokes the tensions and transformations within a new Ireland as traditional values give way to consumerism and one man’s odyssey becomes everyman’s.

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This series of memoirs covers successive attempts by father and son to address the problem of building a rational, inclusive, national political superstructure on an all-Ireland basis, making use of the best of available European experience, and trying to counter the extremes of Catholic nationalism and Orange Protestant hegemonism.

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This biography charts the life of Paddy Moriarty, the Kerryborn Chief Executive of ESB, a man who revolutionized corporate life during his leadership of the largest semi-state company in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s. Born in Dingle in 1926, he became one of Ireland's leading business people of the twentieth century as he transformed ESB into a world-class electricity provider and a highly efficient, commercially driven company. Having built the power infrastructure of the new State, ESB played a critical role in the revitalization of the Irish economy and, on Moriarty's watch, proceeded to assist in developing the foundations of the Celtic Tiger economy. His vision was to make ESB 'the best electricity utility in the whole world', developing the highest standards of infrastructure at home while developing an international business in the economies of North and Central America, Africa, the Middle East and the Far East. Moriarty joined ESB as a clerical officer in June 1945 at the age of nineteen and quickly gained a reputation as a young man with a determined view on how business should be run. He rose rapidly through the company ranks. He was head of Research and Audit in 1961, Assistant Chief Financial Officer in 1967 and Director Personnel in 1970, before becoming Chief Executive in 1981 and Chairman ESB in 1991. The man they called Paddy Mo conducted comprehensive and difficult industrial relations negotiations with the trade unions, ensuring harmony in the workplace during the 1980s – a decade of fast-moving change, massive technological reform and associated redundancies. His interpersonal skills, as well as his business instincts, became legendary. With Taoiseach Charles Haughey he helped pioneer the North-South Erne Waterways project in a bid to revitalize border communities. He was also a significant patron of the arts, encouraging sponsorship of painters, sculptors and musicians. His wide-ranging interests included sports and horse racing, with one of the Leopardstown classics being named in his honour. A sense of family, which included his younger brother Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh the renowned GAA broadcaster and commentator, was central to his world view.

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Desmond Hogan is one of most remarkable literary talents to have come out of Ireland in the past half-century. Larks’ Eggs affirms that stature. Here, with twenty-two classic stories taken from earlier collections and twelve fresh narratives, Hogan displays anew his lyricism, compassion and sheer prismatic brilliance. His subject is exile and self-image, explored through isolates and eccentrics, brittle lives trapped by poverty, personal histories and restless identities, giving a voice to those on the margins – travellers, the misplaced, the dispossessed. Larks’ Eggs‘ compelling tales of diaspora are both global and local, telling of subsumed identity and allurement, of past merging with present through landscape and mindscape. Desmond Hogan’s fragmented personas are repositories for childhood memory and a collective unconscious that is distinctly Irish and history-burdened, while exhilaratingly and wholly universal and modern. ‘Here’s to the storytellers. They made sense of these lonely and driven lives of ours.’ The Lilliput Press is proud to reintroduce one of Ireland’s most evocative prose writers. Desmond Hogan takes his place alongside Joyce, Plunkett, Trevor, O’Faolain, Kiely and McGahern.

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Writer, poet, lecturer, broadcaster and man-of -letters, John Jordan (1930-88) was a distinguished scholar-critic in the Dublin of his day, teaching English at University College Dublin (1955-66) and at the Memorial University of Newfoundland at St John’s (1966-7). A true cosmopolitan, and formidably read, his interests ranged from drama to literature in all its forms. This gathering of prose essays and reviews are taken from the columns of the Irish Press, Hibernia, The Crane Bag and Irish University Review and Poetry Ireland (a magazine he refounded in 1962), as well as from private unpublished papers. They focus on the mid-century canon of Irish and Anglo-American writing: Joyce, Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot, Kavanagh, O’Casey, Behan, Clarke, Stuart, Bowen, Gregory, Synge, Shaw and Wilde, as well as on the new voices of a succeeding generation: Kinsella, Cronin, Hutchinson, Heaney, and Durcan. With occasional literary detours to Russia, France and Spain, Jordan brings a continental sensibility to bear on his literary milieu.

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A gypsy king dies, and a group of villagers seek to save him from the dishonour of a pauper’s grave. The dispute over the inheritance of a well-field becomes a struggle between the ‘old stock’ and the ‘new people’ for the very ownership of their town. A terrier pup reveals the truth of the relationship between a poacher and gamekeeper. A seasoned drinker subverts the ‘dry’ policy of a train chartered by a Pioneer pilgrimage. An old man puts on his best suit for this own wake, telling his family he will be dead by nightfall. And a blind woman only truly realizes her blindness when forced to abandon her home. Stories of enduring friendships and close family ties form the heart of Death of a King. Often hilarious, and as fresh as the day they were written, these stories delicately but potently reveal their characters’ lives in all their toughness and tenderness

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This miscellany gathers together essays and papers written over a span of sixty-odd years. Some are hitherto unpublished, others disinterred from rare and learned periodicals: Together they form a scholarly and diverting mosaic of political and social life in Ireland over the past half-millennium. They take for subjects both individuals and institutions. McDowell examines Swift as a political thinker, Burke and the law, John Hely-Hutchinson, provost and controversialist, and the Ulster leader Edward Carson. More minor characters and events are linked to his lively sketches of Trinity College, from its foundation in the sixteenth century to the Second World War; of Dublin Castle and the viceregal court in its glory and decline; of the Dublin Society of the United Irishmen; of the Anglican episcopate. A nuanced and fascinating portrait of an era, and of Irish-English affairs, emerges, drawn with an unerring eye for human foible and idiosyncrasy. Historical Essays is testimony to the enduring energy and wit of one of Ireland’s most distinguished historians.

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This book brings together a series of essays which unfold and illuminate the history of the Irish flour milling industry from the medieval period to the present day. Milling was one of Ireland’s foremost industries, playing a critically important role in the local economy of many districts, servicing farmers needs and processing some of the key components in the Irish food supply. Despite being the most widely dispersed industry in the country, with bread and other milling components playing a central role in the Irish diet, the topic has not received the attention it deserves from social or economic historians, who’ve focused more on the potato. This book addresses that lacunae and incorporates a range of new research to form a compre-hensive overview. Attractively illustrated by a large collection of photographs and drawings, Irish Flour milling will be of particular interest to social, economic and local historians, industrial archaeologists, ethnologists and anthropologists, and the many people with family connections to the industry: Bolands, Hallinans and Hughes; Pollexfens, Russells, Odlums and Shackletons. Contributors include: Dr Colin Rynne (NUI, Cork), on the industrial archaeology of Irish flour milling from the medieval period to 1880; Professor Louis Cullen (Trinity College, Dublin), on eighteenth-century flour milling; Dr Andy Bielenberg (NUI, Cork), on flour milling during the Union; Dr Richard Harrison (historian), on the Quakers and Irish flour milling 1790-1930; Glynn Jones (author of The Millers), on the introduction of rollers into flour milling 1880-1925; Dr Akihiro Takei (Osaka Gakuin University), on the political economy of Irish flour milling 1922-45; and Norman Campion (milling consultant), on Irish milling since the Second World War.

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On a Ledge, New and Selected Poems stems from six previous collections, the first published in 1931, and includes work composed shortly before the writer’s death in 1992. These thirty-three poems are a celebration of Bryan Guinness’s joie de vivre, exploration of love, dedication to family, and delight in music, painting and the natural world. They draw inspiration from settings in Ireland and southern England, and disclose a voice which expresses a richly contoured inner landscape. His writings, with their paradoxical charm, soft colourings and ease of language, address themes both deeply personal and common to humanity, and they form a distinctive contribution to over sixty years of English and Irish letters.

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Showcasing for the first time 250 of renowned author J.P. Donleavy's most intimate letters, this scrupulously edited collection throws an extraordinary light on the composition, publication and afterlife of The Ginger Man.

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'An original, radical and vital new voice in Irish writing ... [The Cruelty Men] should propel an already proven and prodigious talent to the forefront of contemporary Irish letters.' THE IRISH TIMES 'This is savagely compelling ... There's an incandescent rage at the heart of The Cruelty Men that burns so brightly, it will sear itself into the consciousness of all who read this powerful and moving novel.' THE SUNDAY BUSINESS POST `Emer Martin has written a beautiful alternative history of Ireland ... a book that traces the meaning of storytelling, mislaid culture and the boundless quest for belonging. The prose is captivating and seductive, it left me exhilarated and breathless, with new eyes on what it means to be Irish.' - JUNE CALDWELL *** Abandoned by her parents when they resettle in Meath, Mary O Conaill faces the task of raising her younger siblings alone. Padraig is disappeared, Sean joins the Christian Brothers, Bridget escapes and her brother Seamus inherits the farm. Maeve is sent to serve a family of shopkeepers in the local town. Later, pregnant and unwed, she is placed in a Magdalene Laundry where her twins are forcibly removed. Spanning the 1930s to the 70s, this sweeping multi-generational family saga follows the psychic and physical displacement of a society in freefall after independence. Wit, poetic nuance, vitality and authenticity inhabit this remarkable novel. The Cruelty Men tells an unsentimental tale of survival in a country proclaimed as independent but subjugated by silence.

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Poet, travel writer, teacher, film-extra in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, quiz-show panellist -Kildare Dobbs has played many parts, been many places, met many people. His life’s journey, marked by frequent detours and diversions, from Asia to old Europe, Africa and the New World, is that of the quintessential post-colonial Western man at large. In Running the Rapids Dobbs becomes voyageur. He takes us from a lamp-lit, big house childhood in 1930s Kilkenny, to college days at Cambridge in thrall to Carl Jung and Wilhelm Reich, to commando training and naval service protecting Allied convoys from U-boat attack during World War II. Then began his time from 1948 to 1952 as district officer in Tanganyika, where he learnt Swahili beneath the ‘immense, unearthly bulk’ of Kilimanjaro and was falsely imprisoned for ivory theft. He then moved to Canada to work at Macmillan publishers, co-founding The Tamarack Review and becoming managing editor of Saturday Night magazine from 1965 to 1967. During the seventies he was both columnist and books editor of the Toronto Star. He recounts his friendships with writers Brian Moore, Richard Wright and Mordecai Richler, and with Ronald Searle, Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Thesiger, among others. And nothing if not uxorious, this modern-day troubadour enters the lists of time and again throughout the narrative, finding his peace the third time around. Dobbs’s self-portrait vividly evokes the world of a restless man of letters, Rousseauesque in its foibles and candour, Johnsonianly pungent in its observations, Shandean in its sense of the absurd. ‘In memory and imagination’, he writes, ‘there is no time: all is simultaneous.’ This poignant and delightful chronicle sets out to reinforce that perception.

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Born of a Belfast manse, ROBERT LYND (1879-1949) became one of the most graceful and favoured writers of the early century, and had some thirty books published in his lifetime. The essays in Galway of the Races represent his writings on Ireland (Protestant and Papish, with accounts of Connolly, Kettle, Griffith, Shaw, Yeats and Joyce), on literature (from Donne to Hazlitt, Keats, Turgenev and Chekhov) and on life at large (the Great War, the British Museum, smoking, sport, walking and other pleasures). A biographical introduction underpins the selection. After two posthumous collections Lynd’s reputation declined, but forty years on the work of this autobiographer, critic and social observer re-emerges with all its original vitality. These diverse and entertaining essays will give enduring pleasure to a new generation of readers.

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As one of Northern Ireland's most prominent nationalist politicians, Seamus Mallon has always sought the genuine reconciliation of conflicting traditions using only peaceful means. This is his personal testament. In A Shared Home Place, Mallon evokes his happy childhood in the Protestant heartland of Markethill, south Armagh, and dwells on the turbulent years of constitutional politics in the maelstrom of near-civil war during the 1970s and 19080s. He was the target of both loyalist violence and republican vilification, and his harrowing descriptions of tit-for-tat brutality in Northern Ireland's most bloody region outside Belfast bear poignant witness to the tragedy of hatred between neighbours. Mallon complemented John Hume in laying the foundations of the peace process and gives fascinating insights into what took place behind the scenes of negotiation that led to the Good Friday Agreement. Now in his eighty-third year, Mallon reflects upon this hard-won deal with the Ulster Unionists and calls for a new beginning – a shared home place in which Irish unity can only be achieved through parallel consent. This timely memoir encompasses the social and political history of Northern Ireland, and offers hope for its future. ‘Alongside legendary peace-maker John Hume, Seamus dedicated his life's work to peace with justice and parity of esteem. The story he tells reveals the effects of bad politics and the considerable courage needed to be a champion of change.’ MARY McALEESE ‘Seamus Mallon's integrity, courage and fierce intelligence have long shone through the mark of sectarian emotions and tribal thinking. Here, with undiminished clarity, he illuminates both the recent past and the uncertain future of Ireland.’ FINTAN O'TOOLE ‘Typically honest and compelling, this book will further cement Seamus Mallon's place in the history of the peace process. One of the best of the good guys, witness to some of the worst atrocities of the Troubles, his passion for the future and hope of a new beginning burn as brightly as ever.’ ALASTAIR CAMPBELL ‘Mallon is a great Irishman who we can all honour and learn from. This book is a testament to the peace and progress achieved for the island of Ireland.’ MICHEÁL MARTIN

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Who are the women who walk the beat in Dublin’s red-light districts? How did they get there? Why do they stay? What happens when they try to leave? What are their lives really like? The Beat: Life on the Streets in a fascinating, disturbing account of the lives of sixteen women and their struggle for surival in Dublin’s underworld. Haunted by the drug-related death of his lover Seema, herself a ‘working girl’, David Fine decided to confront his grief head-on – journeying to the heart of an invisible Ireland to find out what it means to be a prostitute. Working as a taxi driver, Fine got to know the women on the streets, unveiling every aspect of their harrowing lives. Their stories command attention and compassion on every page of this revealing book. Fine describes how these women – alternately raging or gentle, brutal or loving, vicious or simply wounded – destroy themselves, how their personalites crash and collapse, driven by the drugs coursing through their veins. Here are Dublin’s ‘working girls’ in their own words. Imelda is fierce, and fiercely loves her two daughters. Sorcha is so strung out on heroin she eats her own clothes. Una will do anything to avoid sex. Teresa was gang-raped at the age of eleven. Despite it all, these women continue to live and love and dream of a better world. The Beat gives voice to the voiceless – Fine’s admiration for their courage shining through. LIke Jim Carrol in The Basketball Diaries and Scorsese in Taxi Driver, he sees human dignity and beauty in life’s darkest corners.

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Terry Prone once thought plastic surgery was for the vain, the self-regarding and the rich. She thought herself the person least likely to submit to the plastic surgeon’s scalpel. But this was before a traumatic car crash in which the steering wheel caved in her cheekbones, broke her jaw and smashed her teeth. In the days and weeks that followed, she began to understand how radically her appearance had changed. She then embarked on a journey of physical – and emotional – reconstruction that gradually became an addiction. Liposuction. Tooth implants. An arm-lift. Two face-lifts and a brow-lift. Diamond eye surgery. Foot surgery. She found she could not stop. Mirror Mirror tells the dramatic story of Terry Prone’s experience of plastic surgery on both sides of the Atlantic and reveals the truth about each procedure: discomforts, costs, failures and (mostly) successes. Charged with her remarkable candour, it is an astonishing story of courage and personal reinvention – and a hilarious exploration of the wilder shores of plastic surgery.

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What’s happening in Ireland? Behind the triumphalist headlines of the boom, there are changes going on – in the way people work, speak, eat, even the way they think – that cannot be quantified by statistics nor squared with the hollow cliché of the Celtic Tiger. She Moves through the Boom is a book about these intangible changes, and it paints a picture the newspapers and tourism propagandists are missing. Ann Marie Hourihane talks to working mothers, Mullingar wine importers, the organizer of a rural water scheme, shop assistants, a Nigerian preacher, teenaged removal men, and other exemplary – because ordinary – members of Irish society. These people aren’t talking about the boom; they’re living it, sometimes without even noticing, and they speak its languages – of social liberation, stubborn tradition, banal consumerism, and others. She Moves through the Boom presents a quirky, kaleidoscopic view of contemporary Ireland. By turns hilarious and dark, it is a fascinating snapshot of a singular moment in our history.

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Dead as Doornails, first published in 1976, brings back into print a true classic of Irish memoir. Anthony Cronin’s account of life in post-war literary Dublin is as funny and colourful as one would expect from an intimate of Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and Myles na Gopaleen; but it is also a clear-eyed and bracing antidote to the kitsch that passes for literary history and memory in the Dublin of today. Cronin writes with remarkable subtlety of the frustrations and pathologies of this generation: the excess of drink, the shortage of sex, the insecurity and begrudgery, the painful limitations of cultural life, and the bittersweet pull of exile. We read of a comical sojourn in France with Behan, and of Cronin’s years in London as a literary editor and a friend of the writer Julian Maclaren-Ross and the painters Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun. The generation chronicled by Cronin was one of wasted promise. That waste is redressed through the shimmering prose of Dead as Doornails, earning its place in Irish literary history alongside the best works of Behan, Kavanagh and Myles.

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The Country Road’ moves heartbreakingly through the days of Cathy, a lonely eight-year-old in a Northern Ireland populated by her elderly neighbours and the vague menace of the security forces. In ‘Bronagh’, the eponymous heroine is wrenched from an idyllic sojourn in Andalucia when her mother falls ill, embarking on a homeward journey of oblivion along the western flank of Europe. ‘A Banal Stain’ tells the story of a graduate student lodging in a once-grand house in Lyon and confronting the ghosts of France’s colonial and Vichy past. In ‘A Recitation of Nomads’ an English painter and her American writer boyfriend, slouching through their twenties together, light out for Morocco to mend their dreams. And ‘The Marriage at Antibes’ is an arranged one between a political refugee, long settled in France, and his newly arrived bride. These stories of travel, unbelonging and otherness, related with the poised eye of a young Elizabeth Bowen, and with remarkable emotional power, announce a compelling voice in Irish fiction.

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Arthur O'Connor was the most important conduit between French republicanism and Irish political radicalism in the late 1790s … His State of Ireland, published in 1798, created a distinctively Irish language of radical democracy out of French sources, by fusing them with the local political tradition and Scottish political economy.' So writes editor James Livesey in his introduction to this new edition of The State of Ireland, first published in pamphlet form in 1798 by Arthur O'Connor, a prominent member of the United Irishmen. O'Connor brought to the revolutionary movement of the 1790s a mind honed on the ideas of Adam Smith – ideas that might not seem revolutionary today, but that had radical implications as adapted by O'Connor and applied to the bizarre political economy of eighteenth-century Ireland. As perhaps the most steadfastly anti-sectarian member of the United Irish movement, O'Connor viewed the vexed debates over 'Protestant liberty' and Catholic Emancipation as distractions from the fundamental questions of political and economic reform; he supported emancipation as a necessary but by no means sufficient element of a free, democratic Irish society. 'What O'Connor's work reveals to us', Livesey writes, 'is the breadth of vision within the United Irishmen and the novelty of their intervention in Irish political culture … O'Connor's text deserves to find a place in the canon of classic political texts that have constructed and made possible, or even imaginable, Irish democracy.'

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Two poets, a playwright and a novelist – Michael Longley, Eavan Boland, Frank McGuiness and Anita Desai – explore in these essays aspects of the imaginative process as each has experienced it: four major writers, four sensibilities, four ways of seeing creativity and its contexts. MICHAEL LONGLEY writes with remarkable candour of his years – 1970 to 1991 – as arts administrator in Northern Ireland. Transforming anecdote into parable, this noted poet measures the cost of ‘trying to remain true to yourself facing the ”dark tower”‘ while being part of an essential but often soul-destroying bureaucracy. EAVAN BOLAND, merging the personal and the theoretical, contends that the place of women as writers in Irish society have been shaped by a ‘ fusion of the national and the feminine’. FRANK MCGUINESS, the internationally acclaimed playwright, offers a radically innovative reading of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, while calling into being the material contexts of creativity – in this instance, a prison cell. The Indian novelist ANITA DESAI looks at her country’s colonial heritage and a shared background that gave rise to the work of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and the film-maker Satyajit Ray. Her fascinating lecture shows how a vibrant indigenous culture, coming into fruitful contact with the West at the end of the nineteenth century, blossomed into artistic creation – yielding parallels with Ireland.

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Arnold Marsh, son of Belfast tin-factory owner born in 1890, is best remembered as an educationist and headmaster of Newtown Quaker School in Waterford, Ireland. His life also saw him travel widely, leaving Canada to work in a gold mine in Northern Ontario, on railway construction in British Columbia, and in a lumber camp in Alaska where he met Scandinavians, Chinese and Japanese, Russians and a Finn who learned language after language so that he could read different versions of the Bible. There he encountered the racism experienced by native Alaskans treated as foreigners in their own country. In 1917, once war was declared in the United States, Marsh sailed from Alaska to California where he played an extra in the Douglas Fairbanks movie A Modern Musketeer. He was eventually ‘inducted’ into the US Army at Camp Lewis, Washington, and was sent to France to join the front line beset by Spanish Flu. After peace was declared, Marsh returned to Ireland where he cycled 1200 miles around Ireland on a ‘Grand Tour’. Returning to his first love, education, he got a job in the Friends School, Lisburn, becoming headmaster in 1926. At that time, he observed that Irish Protestants were pessimistic about their future, many sending their children to English schools. Numbers at Newtown had fallen to twenty pupils and the buildings were dilapidated. In sympathy with the new post-1916 independent Ireland, Marsh took immediate steps to improve the school’s conditions, and during his tenure, numbers grew to 300–400 pupils. His fresh ideas about multi-denominational education took inspiration from his own schooldays at Sidcot in England: ‘The masters were our friends. We could look up to them and enjoy their company. … I got a great deal out of being away for those years, doing other work and getting to know other people. With my students I discussed the whole social system, trying to get people to think things out afresh.’ He married the distinguished portrait painter Hilda Roberts and they, with their daughter Eithne, settled at the foot of the Dublin mountains in Woodtown Park during the late 1930s, building a community of like-minded tenants and idealists drawn from all over Europe. In his later years, he was inspired to write his memoir, illustrated with postcards, letters and photographs describing his journeys and adventures in North America, and his experiences as a headmaster. In 1976, a year before his death aged eighty-six, he was still splitting and sawing logs for the fire, recalling his early career as a lumberjack in Alaska those fateful years ago.

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These 87 black & white photographs taken by Alen MacWeeney in Dublin in 1963/5 are spontaneous images of Dublin and Dubliners in all areas of the city, a street odyssey reflecting a cross section of the people, their habits and behaviour, ten years before Ireland joined the European Union and the wider world. The text on facing pages is composed of social commentary gleaned from a posting of each of the book's photographs on Dublin social media platform Down Memory Lane, eliciting a flood of 70,000 responses during 2020. These photographs of Dublin and Dubliners in 1963 have pertinent social and historical value as attested by their placement in numerous US Universities and museums. The text offers a novel way of understanding and appreciating a full gamut of Dublin personalities through their reactions to the posting of these photographs during the current pandemic. The responses ranged from wonder and incredulity to heated derision, offset by the hilarity that characterize Dubliners. The richness of the commentary will be of interest to any Irish person curious to glimpse Dublin life in the '60s and to gauge the reactions of Dubliners today. MacSweeney's work partakes of the tradition of reportage by Walker Evans, Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank and Richard Avendon, to whom he was apprenticed in Paris during the late fifties.

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Martina Devlin, an award-winning columnist for the Irish Independent and podcaster for Dublin City of Literature #CityofBooks, has delivered a new novel based on the life of Edith Somerville of 'Somerville and Ross' fame - authors of The Irish R.M. In this work, set during the turbulent period of Irish Independence 1921-22, Somerville finds herself at a crossroads. Her position as a member of the Ascendancy is perilous as she struggles to keep her family home, Drishane House in West Cork, while others are burned out. After years in a successful writing partnership with Violet Martin, Edith continues to write after her partner's death, comforted in the belief they continue to connect through automatic writing and seances. Against a backdrop of Civil War politics and lawlessness erupting across the country via IRA flying columns, people across Ireland are forced to consider where their loyalties lie. In Edith, Devlin limns a vivid historical context in this story of proto-feminist Edith Somerville courageously trying to keep home and heart in one piece.

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In 1974, 22-year-old virgin sailor Mick escapes unemployment, family and 3-day-week London to become a deckhand on a small sailboat, Gay Gander, setting out to sail the Atlantic from England's West Country, via the Canaries, to Antigua in the Caribbean. Under the eye of an unfathomable skipper, John Francis Kearney, and his formidable sailing companion Carola (both escaping from a rain-sodden Ireland and broken marriages), Mick has to learn sailing, table manners, bridging the generation gap and getting along with Stryder, the Russian Blue ship's cat. The Long Lost Log should be fiction but is the true story of a voyage of discovery that Mick - against all odds - survived to tell this remarkable and hilarious tale. His inner and outer journey combines danger with the unexpected, the erotic and the comic, in a resonantly related rite of passage that leaps from the page like the curious whale that once disturbed the narrator's watch. The skipper involved happens to be the publisher's late father.

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Patrick Kavanagh (1904–67) was one of Ireland’s foremost poets, best known for ‘The Great Hunger’ and novel Tarry Flynn. He is also remembered for his cantankerous, sometimes volatile nature, fuelled by alcohol. In A Poet in the House: Patrick Kavanagh at Priory Grove, a memoir by Elizabeth O’Toole, we encounter a new Patrick Kavanagh. In 1961, the poet lived with the O’Toole family in Stillorgan for six months at a crucial point in his life, when he was sober, industrious and, as the accompanying photographs will show, much loved by her children. Until now, no one has been aware of how close Kavanagh was to O’Toole and to her husband, James Davitt Bermingham O’Toole. Born and raised in China, Jim O’Toole was the author of Man Alive, a play about the inner workings of the ESB that created a storm of controversy in 1961. On the first night, Kavanagh told the audience that the press was ‘lily-livered’. This was not just ‘a local row’. One of the ESB’s top executives, Jim O’Donovan, was the IRA leader who negotiated a deal with the Nazis that threatened the existence of the State in 1940. Kavanagh’s relationship with O’Donovan and Jim O’Toole’s escape from Germany at the outbreak of the war are here revealed for the first time. Amongst many other revelations in the book is a hitherto unknown connection between the poet and Patricia Avis, novelist wife of the poet Richard Murphy, and lover of Philip Larkin and Desmond Williams. Although Elizabeth O’Toole is now ninety-six, her decidedly down-to-earth voice is that of a much younger woman. Her vivid recollections deepen and challenge the way we view Patrick Kavanagh. The influence of her book will tilt our perception of this passionate man. A contextual essay by the editor of the volume, playwright and novelist Brian Lynch, accompanies the memoir along with photographs from the early sixties.

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Now available for the first time in Ireland and the UK - more than half a century after it was written - is the memoir of Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka (1915-62), the Anglo-Irish doctor and Buddhist monastic novice chiefly known to scholars of sex, gender, and sexuality for his pioneering transition from female to male between 1939 and 1949, and for his groundbreaking 1946 book Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology. Here at last is Dillon/Jivaka's extraordinary life story told in his own words. Out of the Ordinary captures Dillon/Jivaka's various journeys - to Oxford, into medicine, across the world by ship - within the major narratives of his gender and religious journeys. Moving chronologically, Dillon/Jivaka was from Lismullin House, County Meath, but spent his childhood in Folkestone, England, where he was raised by spinster aunts, telling of his days at Oxford immersed in theology, classics, and rowing. He recounts his hormonal transition while working as an auto mechanic and fire watcher in Bristol during World War II and describes his surgical transition under Sir Harold Gillies while Dillon himself attended medical school at Trinity College, Dublin (1945-51). He details his travels as a ship's surgeon in the British Merchant Navy with extensive commentary on his engagement with colonial and postcolonial subjects in Asia, followed by his 'outing' by the British press while he served aboard The City of Bath. Out of the Ordinary is not only a unique record of early gender affirmation but also a compelling account of religious conversion in the mid-twentieth century. Dillon/Jivaka chronicles his gradual shift from Anglican Christianity to the esoteric spiritual systems of George Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky, to Theravada and finally Mahayana Buddhism. He concludes his memoir with the contested circumstances of his Buddhist monastic ordination in India and Tibet. Ultimately, while Dillon/Jivaka died before becoming a monk, his novice ordination was significant: it made him the first white European man to be ordained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. This first-person narrative, written in the early 1960s and first published more than a generation later in the US by Fordham University Press, is both ahead of its time and distinctly of its time and class, with Dillon's views being sometimes enlightened, sometimes colonial. A Foreword by Susan Stryker from the Fordham University Press edition describes Dillon as 'a seeker after truth, who traveled wherever his queries led him'. An Afterword, 'A Mapless Journey', by London-based literary agent Andrew Hewson - unique to the Lilliput Press edition - traces the typescript memoir's provenance and preservation prior to its eventual publication. An introductory biographical essay by consultant psychologist Aidan Collins gives an overview of the timeline of this remarkable individual's history. Out of the Ordinary is a landmark publication that sets free a singular voice from within the history of the transgender movement.

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At the age of twenty-seven, married, living in New York, and working in book design, Mary Cregan gives birth to her first child, a daughter she names Anna. But it's apparent that something is terribly wrong and two days later, Anna dies, plunging Cregan into suicidal despair. Decades later, sustained by her work, a second marriage, and a son, Cregan reflects on and attempts to make sense of this pivotal experience. Weaving together literature and research with details from her long-buried medical records, she writes of her own ordeal and the still-visible scar of a suicide attempt- while considering it as part of a larger history of our understanding of depression. She investigates the treatments she underwent, from hospitalization and shock therapy to psychotherapy and antidepressants. At once intimate and scholarly, The Scar illuminates a too often stigmatised affliction with compassion and intelligence and offers hope to all those who are still struggling.

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Rise above!: Letters from Tyrone Guthrie details the life of the celebrated theatrical director whose influence on international theatre lives on. Here, in a stunning volume of letters, we are offered a glimpse into the vision of this extraordinary figure as well as a view of the intimacies of his relationships with his mother, sister, wife and friends. During the 1940s and 1950s Guthrie was renowned for liberating the plays of Shakespeare from declamatory delivery and excessive staging. His most enduring legacy was in inspiring the creation of modern theatre buildings where the plays of antiquity could be brought closer to the audience, such as at Stratford, Canada, and the theatre that bears his name in Minneapolis, USA. Of Scots-Irish parentage, he identified most closely with his mother’s home at Annaghmakerrig, Co. Monaghan, which he made his professional headquarters after her death, hosting producers, designers, playwrights and composers there while planning worldwide productions. Guthrie’s letters to his mother, Norah, his wife, Judith, and his sister, Peggy, give a balanced account of his professional and domestic life, and it was on the advice of his sister and her husband, Hubert Butler, that he left his mother’s house to the Irish nation as a workplace for writers and artists. Faced with often seemingly insurmountable financial and personal disaster, his celebrated mantra ‘Rise above!’ was testament to a life lived in the wings of an operatic opening night or a Shakespearean tragedy. Guthrie’s vivid descriptions of places visited are matched by the observational skills of his remarks on the people he worked with, among them well-known figures such as Benjamin Britten, Alec Guinness, Charles Laughton, Siobhán McKenna, Micheál MacLíammóir, the Oliviers and others. Family members come in for as many amused comments as do the famous and distinguished: Cousin Molly is no more spared than Sir Winston Churchill. Fitz-Simon has gathered an important, and entrancing, collection of Tyrone Guthrie’s letters, raising a curtain on the life of Ireland’s leading theatre director of the twentieth-century

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A Lost Tribe is a novel that charts the role of the priest in Ireland, from his exalted position to one of an endangered species. The seminarians at St Paul’s are granted permission to watch the opening of Vatican II, transfixed by the procession of bishops ‘vested in flowing robes’. Seduced by the power emanating from Rome and inspired by the vision of the Vatican Council, these young men sacrifice their instincts to a life in the priesthood. The dream collapses when the Irish Church becomes unwilling to evolve with a rapidly mutating world and unable to wield the power it once had. Unable to cope with the pressures of ministry and no longer fulfilled by their call, many abandon their vocation to seek a new life. Mac, a spirited young student, is disillusioned with the inadequacy of his seminary training and is expelled for a tryst, while timid fellow priests share remedies for the collective loneliness of their vocation. King’s daring novel offers an insight into the conflicted life of the priest struggling with the demands of a self-selected lifestyle and the isolation of clerical celibacy. A Lost Tribe is a poignant study of an altered society.

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Originally published in 1992, this childhood memoir, revised and augmented, now has the status of a modern Irish classic. On his first trip abroad, Adrian Kenny observes that the signs are in one language only. There is no need for translation: there is nothing behind. Not so in his suburban childhood and adolescence, where Mayo is behind Dublin, poor fields behind the bourgeois drawing rooms of Rathmines, wildness behind authority. Attached to both, his attempts to reconcile them take him from close certainty to total collapse in the year of change – America, 1968. ‘What was it all for?’ his father asks. ‘It's like the end of the Aeneid,’ whispers his friend. ‘You came at the end of that world,’ Father Wilmot says. The end of Latin Mass, maids, floggings and charcoal suits. The author's keen eye and clear style lends this portrayal of an individual and a generation the truth and elegance of an enduring work of art.

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In a great Irish tradition of autobiographical fiction that includes James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Parker’s poignant novel depicts events surrounding the amputation of his left leg as a nineteen-year-old university student. Masterful vignettes present the callow protagonist’s life before, during and after this ordeal. Belfast, drear locus of rain and despond, contributes to the heaviness at the novel’s heart, as its characters strive to rise above the pervasive melancholy of the city and find some human happiness that they can share. Tosh, Parker’s alter-ego, is drifting through life before his cancer diagnosis, plagued by the twin ‘cankers’ of a puzzling pain in the leg and a crippling loneliness. The amputation forces him into a more authentic relationship with life, which ‘Starts with the wound. Ends with the kiss. For the lucky ones.’ This remarkable, posthumously edited work, largely written in the early 1970s, prefigures the skills Parker would demonstrate in his plays: plainspoken and stoical in tone, the emotion seeps through a membrane of numb reserve. The writing is impressionistically vivid, the descriptions of pain and discomfort wholly authoritative. Hopdance is a beautiful, sincere, personal testament by a true artist, a wondrous ‘lost treasure’ of literature now presented to its reading public.

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Like its three predecessors, this fourth instalment of Trinity Tales gathers together recollections of a decade at Trinity College Dublin. This time, the story is taken up by 1990s graduates– those who passed through its gates as the twentieth century drew to a close–and, through the forty individual voices assembled here, a vivid portrait emerges of student life during those transformative years. Trinity students at the decade’s end had email, mobile phones and the vast resources of the Internet at their disposal. In addition, they were relatively debt-free (undergraduate tuition fees having been abolished in 1996) and every bit as likely to stay and find work in Ireland as to get on the first flight to London or New York. Reflecting this sense of rapid growth, new buildings started springing up around campus, most notably the Samuel Beckett Centre and Goldsmith Hall, and as the millennium approached, the college was expanding in all directions. Contributors encompass the worlds of science, the arts and everything in between, and include actors Dominic West and Mario Rosenstock, writers and journalists Turtle Bunbury, Claire Kilroy and Belinda McKeon, eminent scientists such as Austin Duffy, and sportsman Mark Pollock. Those who arrived at Trinity in the nineties are the generation that came of age in an Ireland caught between the grim, recession-ridden 1980s and the brash, moneyed millenials, an almost unfathomable transition eclipsed only by that between the analogue and digital eras. As with previous volumes, royalties from the book go to the Long Room Library fund.

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‘Despite his deep sense of privacy, Beckett’s persona has been so widely written about that it has become unavoidably mixed up in our imagination with what Bernold calls his “creatures”. Whether or not Barthes and Foucault were right to dismiss the figure of the author, when confronted with Vladimir wincing or Krapp hunched over his tape recorder or Molloy resting on his bicycle, one’s mind always seems to turn to the “gentle mask” placed over the “severe ossature” that has been immortalized in John Minihan’s photographs, surely among the most iconic images of the twentieth century. We simply cannot help it.’ (From the translator’s preface) Meeting in the cafés and streets of Paris, with conversations noted and hesitancies observed, the gradual exfoliation of a personality is revealed across the last decade of Beckett’s life as one intellectual appraises another. This is a charming and sympathetic study of one of literature’s most opaque writers and of his interests in music, philosophy, visual arts and the spoken arts. In shedding sympathetic light on a famously private Irishman abroad, these verbal exposures complement John Minihan’s contemporaneous and intimate black-and-white photographs, taken in the same environs.

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Ben Contini, a disenchanted painter of considerable talent, has just buried his mother. Rifling through the attic of her Kilkenny house he stumbles across a Modigliani nude, worth millions. Determined to learn the provenance of the painting, he and Elsa, a disturbed and secretive woman who accosts him at the funeral, become embroiled in the sinister world of Nazi art theft. But they are not the only one with an interest in the painting… Together they set off on a frantic journey that leads them from Dublin to France via the Cotswolds, down the Canal du Midi into Italy. The intrigue surrounding the shadowy half-truths about their exotic families becomes increasingly sinister as Ben and Elsa are forced to confront their pasts and their buried demons. Set in the 1980s, this is a fantastic new book from established thriller writer Joseph Hone, who weaves a breathless, galloping intrigue packed with narrative twists and sumptuous evocations of Europe’s forgotten past.

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Professor J. Valentine Rice, erstwhile Chair of Education at Trinity College Dublin (1966-2005) to whom this volume of essays is dedicated in memoriam, engaged in the richness and diversity of education debate during the thirty-nine years that he held his academic post. His interests in the philosophy of education, Catholic education, human growth and guidance and the Irish language and culture are reflected in the essays by his former colleagues and students presented here. Whether it is the teaching of Irish, the involvement of the churches in education, the points system or the managerialism and "edunomics" of the universities, educational debate is vigorous and often passionate. The diversity of the themes of the contributions seems, on a first viewing, to indicate the lack of a common theme. On closer reflection, however, Val Rice's lifelong commitment to a view of education that must always be broad enough to encompass the many ways in which it aids genuine human flourishing, shines through. These essays are examples of the ways in which colleagues and students have responded to his influence as teacher, mentor, advocate and friend as they continue to work and engage in the broad field of education.

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Cathal Gannon (1910-1999) revived the art of harpsichord making in Dublin in the early 1950s after a lull of some 150 years. His story is one not of rags to riches but of obscurity to recognition. Despite a modest start in life, he became hugely respected for his skills and was awarded two honorary MA degrees (TCD 1978, Maynooth 1989) for his contribution to music in Ireland. This richly documented biography charts Cathal’s life from his Dublin childhood through his career in the Guinness Brewery, begun at the age of fifteen, to an active and prolific retirement, during which he continued to make harpsichords and restore antique pianos. Although the seeds of interest were sown in early life, his harpsichord-making career only began in 1951, and his first harpsichord was played in public in 1959 – an occasion lauded in the national press. A few years later, his employers set up a special workshop in the Brewery where Cathal would work exclusively on instrument making. With his impish sense of fun, he became well known as a prankster by his colleagues. This book also offers fascinating behind-the-scene glimpses of the ‘unofficial ‘ goings-on in the Guinness Brewery. Many people were drawn to Cathal through his liveliness and quick mind. He befriended the likes of Grace Plunkett (widow of Joseph Mary Plunkett), Carl Hardebeck, a noted arranger of Irish music, and Desmond and Mariga Guinness, founders of the Irish Georgian Society. He was the subject of several RTE radio and television programmes, including The Late Late Show. This intimate account of a man who was, in his own words, ‘interested in everything’ (amongst other hobbies, he was a keen amateur horologist), reveals a storyteller who delighted in the colourful characters he encountered. The work is further enriched by its lively evocation of Dublin and its environs in bygone times, from a rustic Dolphin’s Barn in the 1920s to the bookstalls and antique shops of the city centre during the 1930s and 1940s, giving a real sense of time’s passing and the social change that has since occurred.

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‘Each time we lay down together, I thought of pounding fetlocks, the flex of tendons, the press of horse shoe against my chest, the ring of purple flesh it would leave on my stomach, his galloping, galloping into me … Each night, after, I filled the space we’d made with the whine and later the voice of the violin, my voice, coming quicker and quicker, my fingers finding the notes through his hair, quicker and quicker through my bow arm sweeping across the strings, down the flutes of muscle on his back. It came mellow and low then quicker and harder and pizzicato and striking each note, forcing it from the wood and into the still sycamores, pin oaks, maples. Always, the violin called between the spaces.’ In this stunning fictional début Kelly Sullivan explores of the inner life of Grace: mother, wife, and talented violinist. Finding release only in her music, Grace exists in a state of profound emotional paralysis, until the storm. 18 August 1969 – Hurricane Camille ravages all that lies in her path; at a party in Mississippi drunken revellers eagerly await her arrival. As they sway to the sound of a stereo hi-fi, outside ‘the trees whip by and the rain whips down’. Twenty-four people die inside the beachfront building when it’s razed ‘flatter than a winter bayou’. Speeding over drifting sand, Grace, her husband and his newly acquired lover make a last-minute dash to safety. In the days that follow, Grace surveys the destruction wrought by the tempest. Like the wood of her beloved violin, her fractured ego risks crumpling under the pressure: ‘Too much moisture and you’re gonna warp her, but too little and you’ll have more cracks,’ the violin repairman had warned. In Winter Bayou, Grace journeys through the past, from the heady rush of teenage love to a marriage ‘ripped apart too … shredded and pushed beyond our boundaries’ – her meditations forming a perfectly poised novella as lyrically tender as it is viscerally sensuous.

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Riverdance exploded across the stage at Dublin’s Point Theatre one spring evening in 1994 during a seven-minute interval of the Eurovision Song Contest hosted by Ireland. It was a watershed moment in the cultural history of a country embracing the future, a confident leap into world music grounded in the footfall of the choreographed kick-line. It was a moment forty-five years in the making for its composer. In this tenderly unfurled memoir Bill Whelan rehearses a lifetime of unconscious preparation as step by step he revisits his past, from with his Barrington Street home in 1950s Limerick, to the forcing ground of University College Dublin and the Law Library during the 1960s, to his attic studio in Ranelagh. Along the way the reader is introduced to people and places in the immersive world of fellow musicians, artists and producers, friends and collaborators, embracing the spectrum of Irish music as it broke boundaries, entering the global slipstream of the 1980s and 1990s. As art and commerce fused, dramas and contending personalities come to view behind the arras of stage, screen and recording desk. Whelan pays tribute to a parade of those who formed his world. He describes the warmth and sustenance of his Limerick childhood, his parents and Denise Quinn, won through assiduous courtship; the McCourts and Jesuit fathers of his early days, the breakthrough with a tempestuous Richard Harris who summoned him to London; Danny Doyle, Shay Healy, Dickie Rock, Planxty, The Dubliners and Stockton’s Wing, Noel Pearson, Seán Ó Riada; working with Jimmy Webb, Leon Uris, The Corrs, Paul McGuinness, Moya Doherty, John McColgan, Jean Butler and Michael Flatley. Written with wry, inimitable Irish humour and insight, Bill Whelan’s self deprecation allows us to to see the players in all their glory, vulnerability and idiosyncracy. This fascinating work reveals the nuts, bolts, sheer effort and serendipities that formed the road to Riverdance in his reinvention of the Irish tradition for a modern age. As the show went on to perform to millions worldwide, Whelan was honoured with a 1997 Grammy Award when Riverdance was named the ‘Best Musical Show Album.’ Richly detailed and illustrated, The Road to Riverdance forms an enduring repository of memory for all concerned with the performing arts.

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In this reflective and enriching memoir, John Tuomey navigates the places and memories of his life over the scope of twenty-five years. First recognised for the urban regeneration of Dublin’s Temple Bar, which included the construction of the Irish Film Institute, the National Photographic Archive and Gallery of Photography, his life in architecture led him to design social and cultural spaces such as the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, the Glucksman Gallery in UCC and the Victoria & Albert East Museum in London. Imbued with many inter-textual references to poetry, drama and literature and written in limpid prose, this memoir is inherently literary in nature. Tuomey looks back to his early life where he was born in Tralee and lived in different counties around Ireland, from small towns to country landscapes, from schooldays in Dundalk to student activism at University College Dublin. He traces the pathways that led to his formation as an architect, reflecting on the many cultural and social influences on his life. He excels in capturing the social landscape of Dublin in the 1980s and pays particular attention to the many buildings and social hubs of the inner city. His transient years of moving from Dublin to London, and subsequently working in places like Nairobi and Milan, chronicle the international influences on his outlook. The key relationships in his life, including meeting his future wife, Sheila – a fellow student of architecture in UCD – and his pivotal employment by James Stirling in 1976, form the backbone of his personal and professional life. Tuomey’s expertise in his field is unsurpassed, with meticulous detail given to the finer aspects of design and architecture. His thoughts on the challenges facing the encroaching erasure of city life in Dublin are essential reading for anyone with an interest in the future of building in the city.

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The Great Spotted Woodpecker first bred in Ireland in 2009. Since then the author has followed the daily lives of this species, a family of whom had taken up residence in a windtorn Spanish chestnut tree near his home in the depths of County Wicklow. This unique and personal account of a family of woodpeckers raising their young brings the reader deep into the world of this fascinating species: a world of hope, love, death, new life and ultimately success. It explores the richness and diversity of the natural wonders found in County Wicklow against a backdrop of a more general overview of the species in Ireland. It includes a foreword by filmmaker John Boorman, and features illustrations by Killian Mullarney and Flemming Christoffersen with stunning colour photographs by Dick Coombes. This book is to be treasured by everyone – not just ornithologists, but those with an interest in the natural world around them.

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These are just a few samples from an eighteenth-century Commonplace Book, passed down the generations from Mary Cannon’s kitchen to her many times great-granddaughter Marjorie Quarton. A Commonplace Book was a scrapbook for sayings, letters, prayers, measurements, or, as in this instance, of recipes. Mary Cannon lived in Dunleary (now Dun Laoghaire) and collected over 120 recipes between 1700 and 1707. They are presented here in sections such as ffishe, ffleshe, Puddings and Deserts, Pickles and Preserves. The visceral vocabulary and archaic spellings of these dishes will refresh our word hoard, while imparting a sumptuous flavour to Ireland’s gastronomic repertoire. Unopened and untried for over 300 years, they form a unique resource for food historians and knights of the dining table. Marjorie Quarton has edited these recipes, commenting on the significance and usage of certain ingredients. She has added fragments of family history, from Jacobite leaders and Huguenot refugees to tales of the Indian Mutiny. The recipes are illustrated by Alice Bouilliez, also a descendent of Mary Cannon.

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