Search results for ""the lilliput press ltd""

Judith Mok was born in the Netherlands, to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. She trained as a classical singer and travelled the world performing as a soloist, while publishing a novel and poetry collection there. For the last twenty years she has been based in Ireland, where she has become the country's leading voice coach, working with classical singers and many international pop stars. In recent years she started to write in English, publishing a novel and poetry collection and contributing to publications like the Irish Times. The State of Dark is a memoir and detective story. Like many children of Holocaust survivors, she was raised with the emotional trauma of having no other family members, while her parents tried to rebuild their lives in postwar Europe. Despite the constant and occasionally intrusive presence of the past - Anne Frank's father Otto makes an emotional visit to her father to hand over some letters - she had little concrete information about the hundreds of members of her family who died. All the same, the Holocaust and its consequences continued to haunt her life. At one point in her career she worked with the great German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. It was only years later that she discovered the full extent of Schwarzkopf 's collaboration with the Nazi regime. Not only was she a full member of the National Socialist Party, but was also the mistress of Hans Frank, the notorious 'Butcher of Poland'. Later, Mok would discover that Schwarzkopf had entertained the German troops in Poland at around the same time her family were being murdered there. A chance phone call made from her Dublin home in search of more information unleashes a whole process whereby Mok disovers, in shocking and intimate detail, the terrible fate of her family. The State of Dark is a highly original, moving and beautifully written memoir of the so-called Second Generation trauma, which documents how the Holocaust continues to be a living issue in European life and culture, including in Ireland.

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In this slim, attractive collection of short stories, Harry Crosbie colourfully describes life in Dublin in the 1960s. These funny and poignant pieces are told from the perspective of a teenage boy working in Dublin’s docklands and illuminate an older Dublin that will be familiar to many readers. Written during the lockdown of 2020, writes from the heart and will charm and delight with tales of docklands life.

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Available for the first time in paperback, Robert O’Byrne’s landmark biography of Hugh Lane remains the essential work on this enigmatic art dealer and patron. From his birth in Cork in 1875, to London, South Africa and Dublin, Hugh Lane is primarily remembered for establishing Dublin’s Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, the first known public gallery of modern art in the world. He never married and, though rumoured to have been homosexual, never had a documented relationship with a man. He was also a person of great social energy who befriended and sometimes crossed swords with the leading cultural figures of his day: Yeats, Gregory, Orpen, Augustus John, Rodin, Beerbohm, and many others. Robert O’Byrne writes with clarity and insight about a man who, since his untimely death on R.M.S. Lusitania in 1915, has been something of a mystery.

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According to Thomas Kilroy, his captivating memoir materialized in response to a cataract operation in 2006, shocking his memory into being and imparting him with a uniquely tactile and sensuous perception of his own past. Over the Backyard Wall describes a coming of age embodied by escape, self-discovery and a struggle to contend with the rigid culture of a small Irish town in Co. Kilkenny during WWII, with parents representing both sides of the civil war conflict of the 1920s. He describes encounters with fellow Kilkenny artists Tony O’Malley and Hubert Butler, and writers such as Flannery O’Connor during his tour of the southern US states in the 1950s. In keeping with Kilroy’s previous works, Over the Backyard Wall utilizes the silences of the past to liberate the imagination, making use of social and political history to reinvigorate the shard-like nature of his own narrative memory.

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What is the sound of a voice that is alienated from itself? How can one truthfully represent the creative process of an artist? Oona, an artist-in-the-making, lives in an affluent suburban culture of first-generation immigrants in New Jersey where conspicuous consumption and white privilege prevail, and the denial of death is ubiquitous. The silence surrounding death extends to the family home where Oona is not told while her mother lies dying of cancer upstairs. Afterwards, a silence takes hold inside her: her inner life goes into a deep freeze. Emotionally hobbled, she has her first encounters with sex, drugs and other trials of adolescence. Lyons’ first novel gives voice to a female character on her fraught journey into adulthood and charts her evolution as an artist, as her adolescent dissociation is thawed through contact with the physical world, the materials of painting and her engagement with Irish community, culture and landscape. Set during the era of the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath, this is a resonant story conveyed in an innovative form. Written entirely without the letter ‘o’, the tone of the book reflects Oona’s inner damage and the destruction caused by hiding, omitting and obliterating parts of ourselves.

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This full-colour kaleidoscope of over 150 photographs by one of North America's leading photographers evokes a pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, recording a world on the cusp of radical change: a time-capsule of personalities and landscapes, professions and activities, caught in the amber of the camera's eye. Beginning with an Irish assignment from British Vogue in 1969, Woods' interest deepened with marriages to two Irish husbands, and she developed an abiding love for the people and places documented in subsequent decades. This Valentine to Ireland is now gathered into one resonant volume of images and visual epiphanies. The work ranges across the Irish countryside. Departing from Dublin and Wicklow, it extends to Roscommon and the Shannon estuary, recording street scenes, Travellers, the hunt, cattle marts and pub, cottage and country-house interiors. Six of the eight photo-essays focus on leading personalities: Garech Brown of Luggala, founder of Claddagh Records; the late Desmond FitzGerald, last knight of Glin; Marina Guinness, chatelaine; the late J.P. Donleavy, novelist, at home in County Westmeath; Hector McDonnell, artist, at home in Glenarm; and Tim Pat Coogan, historian.

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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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Many people will remember Melosina’s voice from ‘Sunday Miscellany’, where these pieces were first broadcast, or have read them in ‘Irishwoman’s Diary’ in The Irish Times. Fewer may have discovered her intriguing short stories, most of them published here for the first time. Though all of her writing conveys her distinctive slant on things, relatively few of her essays were directly concerned with her personal life. Several of these are collected here, including a moving account of her first experience of the cancer from which she eventually died in 2011. Growing up as a tea-planter’s daughter in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), evacuated with her mother to Africa during the war, Melosina Lenox-Conyngham acquired early on a taste for travel and an interest in the curiosities of life. Certainly these qualities are well illustrated in this collection. Her many years as Secretary to the Butler Society gave her expertise at rallying the clan as well as a special interest in key figures from Kilkenny local history. Vignettes of Irish social life take us to houses that have never been sold or fill readers in on the strange eventful history of a portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire. Some of the most intriguing of the essays cover her travels to remote parts of the globe, to Yemen, the home of the legendary Queen of Sheba, to Nagaland in the far north-east of India, or to Timbuktu in Mali. But even if it is only a visit to a restaurant in Barcelona where food is served entirely in the dark, or an artistic centre high in the Pyrennees, the amused gaze of the writer brings the experience vividly to life. Edited by her niece Sophia Grene, the volume is divided into several sections each of which is introduced by members of the family or friends who round out the sense of the writer’s life. This anthology of Melosina Lenox-Conygham’s writings, so rich in her delightful sense of humour, her ironic and quizzical pleasure in the world around her, has something for everyone to enjoy.

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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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Ink-Stained Hands fulfils a considerable gap in Irish visual arts publications as the first book to present the activities of printmakers in Ireland from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. The central narrative of this profusely illustrated and documented book is the foundation of Graphic Studio Dublin in 1960, an event which revolutionized the graphic arts in Ireland and made the European tradition of printmaking available to Irish artists.

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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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Athlone-born writer John Broderick was an astringent commentator on the rapidly shifting mores of Ireland from the 1950s to the 1980s. Better known for his novels, he was also a prolific reviewer and essayist. This new collection brings together a fascinating and eclectic selection of his book reviews and other journalism, as well as some previously unpublished short fiction. Between 1956 and 1988 Broderick produced over three hundred review columns on a wide range of books and topics. A carefully chosen selection of these include his thoughts on Francis Stuart, Lee Dunne, Padraic Fallon, Oscar Wilde, Kate O’Brien and Liam O’Flaherty, among others. His journalism also gave him space to reflect on other preoccupations, such as Athlone, Irish society, the Church, books, writers and human nature. It allowed him freedom to write humorously, seriously, sometimes pessimistically, even savagely. His writings are of increasing relevance and interest in today’s Ireland.

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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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The girl of this story is a clairvoyant. To the other children in the local National School, she is an ‘imbissil’, a creature of the margins. But she is a lightning-conductor for all that happens in one small Irish country town and through her are channeled all the dreams and desires of its exuberant inhabitants. The girl’s grandmother, lives in a beech tree, ‘screeching, singing … fragments constantly spilling out of her memory-box’; Vera McGettrick’s fiance blows his head off a week before their wedding; Liz Duffy, the ‘apostate’ who marries a protestant (‘the other crowd’), is denounced as a ‘slut, whore and rip’; and the lovelorn ghost of Dockery the draper, is ‘still to be seen fishing on winter evenings’. Potently charged with historical echoes, eroticism, literary allusion and wild humour, Story of a Girl takes the reader on a rollercoaster voyage into a kaleidoscopic world of pure, unfettered language. Here, lyrical English, visions, snatches of song and bursts of Irish combine to harness the very pulse of life, engaging the reader’s attention on every shimmering page.

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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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Based on extensive archival research, this fascinating monograph rescues from obscurity the lives of over a thousand Fenians. Fenianism railed against the depopulation of a postFamine Ireland, asserting the rights of ordinary people in defi ance of the British Empire, then oft en supported by the emergent Catholic middle class. As a tenacious conspiracy, represented in these islands by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Fenianism propagated an independent, egalitarian republic through travelling organizers and radical newspapers, inspired by the ideals of Th eobald Wolfe Tone. Soldiers of Liberty traces the secret organization throughout Ireland, Britain, North America and Australasia, highlighting the contribution of Fenian women and the oft en tragic lives of committed activists, while revealing the hitherto-unknown fate of ubiquitous informers enlisted by Dublin Castle.

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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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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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