Search results for ""the lilliput press ltd""

These books are being reissued as they appeared in the first Dolmen Press editions in one composite volume, with an invaluable, contextual introduction by eighteenth-century Swift scholar Andrew Carpenter. He assesses the reaction of Swift’s serious biographers and commentators to the original publications: ‘… two remarkable books, driven by sympathetic and intuitive enquiry, which made an important contribution to Swift studies when they appeared in the 1960s and which still remain significant for all those interested in Swift’s life and works’. Cadenus is primarily concerned with the relationship between Swift and Vanessa (Esther Van Homrigh), Swift’s Most Valuable Friend with that between Swift and Stella (Esther Johnson). Both help to determine the precise nature of this triangle, and the impact it had on his writing and career.

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This ‘new journalism’ by Irish Times women writers originally appeared on the Women First pages during the 1970s. Together, the pieces reflect the enormous social and political upheaval of the years when, as the first woman’s page editor Mary Maher put it, “Irish women were invented”. The voices of this exciting anthology, diverse, sparkling, irreverent, record with wit and intelligence an Ireland on the brink of transformation. Changing The Times showcases the best of this writing, by Maeve Binchy, Mary Leland, Gabrielle Williams, Christina Murphy, Geraldine Kennedy, Maev Kennedy, Eileen O’Brien, Caroline Walsh, Theodora FitzGibbon, Nell McCafferty, Renagh Holohan, Elgy Gillespie and others. Issues of the day are articulated and explored: pregnancy, fashion, first loves, sexuality, a burgeoning feminism, an imploding Catholic Church, an exploding North. Nell McCafferty profiles a young Ian Paisley, visits New York and talks to the family of a girl tarred and feathered in Derry; Maeve Binchy interviews Samuel Beckett and Iris Murdoch; Mary Holland follows the North, while Renagh Holohan is caught in its explosions; Elgy Gillespie encounters Muhammed Ali, Tyrone Guthrie and Robert Lowell; while Mary Cummins interviews Bernadette Devlin about having her first baby. As the mirror of a confident young nation, and a window onto one of the most eventful decades in recent Irish history, Changing the Times gives these writings the afterlife they richly deserve.

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Trinity student Charles Stanihurst, the son of a Dublin merchant and a Roscommon chambermaid, flees his native city after assaulting an English officer and heads for the West of Ireland, where he encounters a culture virtually unknown within the pale. Beyond the Shannon much of the old Gaelic way of life is still intact, though under growing threat from the political power and land greed of the ‘foreigners’. Charles is forced to confront divisions between his Anglo-Irish and Gaelic loyalties, while seeking his spiritual father, Bishop William Bedell, who is translating the Old Testament into Irish. Set in post-Flight of the Earls, pre-Cromwellian Ireland of 1641, this novel tells the gripping story of a struggle between two opposing cultures that set the scene for the rebellion sealing the fate of Gaelic Ireland.

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In south Kilkenny, where Duiske stream joins the river Barrow at Graiguenamanagh, lies one of Ireland’s many Norman-Cistercian abbeys. Song of Duiske is a novella set amongst this monastic community in the year 1304, a century after the abbey’s foundation. It evokes the textures and rhythms of a medieval religious settlement, its peaceful routines as well as occasional trials, and celebrates with quiet lyricism the seasons and their solaces, ‘the open sky, the fields and the woods’.

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Using a play by Karl and Josef Capek as source, Flann O’Brien locates his insect drama in Dublin, his most familiar stalking- territory. His adaptation is a vehicle for ridicule and invective, targeting race, religion, greed, identity and purpose. With his extraordinary ear for dialogue, O’Brien creates his own fantastical world, and the outcome is a hilarious satire of Irish stereotypes – as Orangemen, Dubliners, Corkagians and culchies become warring ants, bees, crickets, dung-beetles, and other small-minded invertebrae. The lost text of this play, Hilton Edwards’ prompt copy from the 1943 Gate Theatre performance, was discovered in the archives at Northwestern University, Illinois.

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In Showbusiness with Blood, Eamon Carr beguiles the reader with an insightful account of the world’s greatest boxers, from Steve Collins to Mike Tyson to Tyson Fury and Katie Taylor. Boxing, Ireland’s most successful Olympic sport, became turbo-charged in the mid-90s. A golden age followed as Irish boxers excelled in the harsh, violent and sometimes tragic business that is professional boxing. Having become enamoured of the sport during a period of serious illness as a child, Eamon Carr was on hand to witness the victories and disasters. The core principle of prize-fighting – striking and defence – demands enormous courage each time the boxer steps forward. Surrounded by enthusiastic fans, the ring can yet be the loneliest place in the world. Ireland embodies this tradition with renewed focus over the past three decades in a golden age of boxing. Showbusiness with Blood takes the reader on an intimate journey through Irish boxing’s years of triumph and desolation. Carr’s enthusiasm for the sport illuminates the dark corners of the fight game with stories from gruelling training camps, noisy press conferences, behind-the-scenes hustling and the savage brutality of championship fights. These are stories of aspiration and devastation. Yet amid the chaos and destruction of the boxing ring are inspirational tales of courage, resilience and personal redemption: boxing’s enduring saving grace Featured boxers include: Steve Collins, Wayne McCullough, Bernard Dunne, Darren Sutherland, Tyson Fury, Jamie Conlan, Andy Lee, John Joe Nevin, Katie Taylor, Willie Casey, Carl Frampton, Michael Conlan, Mike Tyson, Seamus McDonagh, Conor McGregor, Martin Rogan, Michael Carruth, Francis Barrett, Matthew Macklin and Gary ‘Spike’ O’Sullivan.

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There is a radical agency in John Moriarty's work that we as readers don't always spot. As our heads spin with mythological cross-referencing, poetical leaps and the philosophical bent, it is clear that there is nothing domestic, nothing tame, about John Moriarty. The power of Moriarty is that he has found a thousand beautiful ways to say something very disturbing: we have to change our lives. In this small book of big thoughts, award-winning author, mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw situates Moriarty's work with respect to our eco-conscious era and a readership seeking spiritual and philosophical guidance. Moriarty asks of us only one thing - that we move our gaze from seeing to beholding. And there the trouble begins, when we realize there is a world beyond us far bigger than our temporary ambitions. A Hut at the Edge of the Village presents a collection of Moriarty's writings ordered thematically, with sections ranging from place, love and wildness through to voyaging, ceremony and the legitimacy of sorrow. These carefully chosen extracts are supported by an introduction by Martin Shaw and foreword by Tommy Tiernan, a long-time admirer of Moriarty's work. According to Shaw, 'These are not pastoral times we are living in, but prophetic. We are at a moment when the world as we understand it has been turned upside down. The challenge is that there are fewer and fewer people who can interpret such happenings in a deep, soulful way. Moriarty can do that. When culture is in woeful crisis, the insights never come from parliament, senate, or committee; they come from the hut at the edge of the village. Let's go there. There is tremendous, unexpected hope waiting.'

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In mid-1970s rural Wicklow, John Hughes, a once-feted journalist/author with writer’s block, reflects on recent events. When English author William Cromer and his German lover Ingrid move to the Old Rectory nearby, their lives are transformed and an alcohol-fuelled affair begins. Hughes puts at risk everything he has ever loved – his wife Laura, teenage daughter Rachael and the bucolic ease of their quiet corner of Ireland. Nationalist resentment of this tax-free haven enjoyed by foreigners is sparked by events in Northern Ireland, and John finds himself in the middle of extortion, blackmail, marital betrayal and a suicide. As old and new friendships unravel, even lunchtime visits to the local pub become points of attrition. Losing his friends and mistress, John is forced to take responsibility for his actions in order to save his family and his integrity, and to find release as a writer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In this gathering of ten stories, beginning and ending over Dublin’s River Poddle, David M Kiely merges history with fiction to illuminate mysteries that have baffled literary scholars for generations. Could the interlocutor in Minot’s Tower reveal the precise nature of Dean Swift’s dementia? What odd adventures befell Goldsmith on his European excursion? Did Wolfe Tone’s brother provide a source for Maria Edgeworth’s novels? What was George Moore’s reaction to his extraordinary portrait by Manet? Was James Joyce’s secret visit to Dublin nurturing an incipient Work in Progress? Were Somerville and Ross in extra-mundane communion? It is a measure of the skill of Kiely’s writing – grounded in historical detail, brilliantly observed, stylistically various and exact – that these questions seem not implausible. His findings are often wry, occasionally irreverent, morbid and even brutal, but the reader is left in no doubt that the writers in this work have earned Ireland a special place in the literature of English-speaking peoples. Among the stories we find Brendan Behan, master of ceremonies, carrying out a grotesque experiment in a Fitzwilliam Street drinking den in 1947; the nine-year old Sean O’Casey encountering Maud Gonne and her menagerie; a post-coital Wilfrid Blunt and Lady Gregory discussing the rights of small nations; the madness of Dean Swift explored in a vision in St. Patrick’s bell-tower. ‘A Night in the Catacombs‘ is an extraordinary début collection of fictions.

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

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This handsome volume presents more than twenty images of book covers, poems and other works that reflect Sligo's presence in the work of W.B. Yeats and his family.

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No Better Boy tells the story of a master of traditional Irish music: the legendary East Clare fiddler Paddy Canny, whose haunting music was remarkable for its virtuosity and sophistication. In the 1950's, when he was in his thirties, and at the pinnacle of his career, Paddy Canny became an international radio star, played solo in Carneige Hall, toured England with the renowned Tulla Ceili Band, and made a much-loved recording. All were extraordinary achievements for a man raised on a marginal farm, where the gramophone records that inspired him were accessible only through the good grace of neighbours. In richly evocative prose, Helen O'Shea distils stories of success and adversity that Paddy Canny told to family and friends, to radio interviews and historians. These stories illuminate the rural life in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, major social and economic changes, and the decline and revival of traditional music and dancing. A compelling story told with passion and insight, this is a book for readers with an interest in Ireland's social history and for music lovers everywhere. No Better Boy includes annotated transcriptions of music played by Paddy Canny and his contemporaries, sourced from archives and personal collections as well as commercial recordings.

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In his memoir, A Life in Medicine: From Asclepius to Beckett, Eoin O’Brien, a cardiologist with an international reputation as a clinical scientist, recounts his life in medicine and literature. He depicts his relatively privileged upbringing in a medical family in the impoverished city that was post-war Dublin and describes his intensely Catholic schooling in St Conleth’s School and Castleknock College, and his eventual rejection of religion. O’Brien describes his training in medicine in the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin and in its teaching hospitals, the Richmond and the Rotunda, with personal vignettes of his teachers and how doctors were trained in the nineteen fifties. Moving to England to specialise as a cardiologist, he recounts, from the unique vantage point of a front-line doctor, the early development of the exciting speciality of cardiology. He was actively involved in the development of coronary care units, in which the then horrendous mortality from heart attack would be reduced with the introduction of new drugs, pacemakers and the techniques of resuscitation and defibrillation. Back in Dublin, O’Brien describes the practice of medicine in the city, and how he and his colleagues established a research unit that would gain international recognition for the treatment of patients with high blood pressure. He traces his role in many activities, including journalism and recording the history of Dublin’s voluntary hospitals, which were being closed to usher in a new era of hospital care. O’Brien’s interest in literature brought into a close friendship with many remarkable writers and artists that included Samuel Beckett, Nevill Johnson, Con Leventhal, Edith Fournier, Brian O’Doherty and Niall Sheridan and in the final section, he writes about these associations, giving unique glimpses into the lives of many remarkable people. His recollections of Samuel Beckett, alone, make this an essential text for those interested in the Nobel Prize-winning writer.

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SET IN DUBLIN'S LIBERTIES, Estelle Birdy's explosively original debutRavellingchannels the energies and agonies of young men let loose in the city, where they balance their hopes with the harsh realities of their present. Hurtling between friendships, feuds, drug-deals, family and brushes with the law, this is modern Dublin as never before portrayed.

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Emer Martin’s is a radical, vital voice in Irish writing, as she challenges the history of silence, institutional lies, evasion and the mistreatment of women across mid-to-late twentieth-century Ireland. Two families inhabit this immersive polyvocal work, an intergenerational saga announced with The Cruelty Men (2018) and continued here as punk rockers and Magdalene laundries spiral into a post-colonial Ireland still haunted by its tribal undertow. Scenes surface from Ireland’s mythological past, Tudor plantations, workhouses and industrial schools, the Troubles laid bare, the transformative pre-digital decades playing out in this propulsive narrative. Thirsty Ghosts is epic in scope while intimate in focus. The Lyons, professionals in a newly independent state, are attacked by paramilitaries in their family home in Tyrone. The eccentric O’Conaills of Kerry, traumatized by displacement, find themselves in leafy Dublin 4. We encounter a servant who meets Henry VIII, a Lithuanian Jewish family who become part of the fabric of Dublin, and a wild young girl who escapes the laundry only to stumble into a psycho pimp. Related with dark humour, verve and high literary style, Thirsty Ghosts is a revelatory exploration of Ireland combining themes of power, class, fertility, violence and deep love, forces as universal as the old stories that permeate and illuminate each character’s life.

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Bungalow Bliss, first published in 1971, was a book of house designs that buyers could use to build a home for themselves affordably. It first appeared two years before Ireland was to join the EEC as a self-published catalogue by Jack Fitzsimons from his Kells Art Studios in County Meath. He and his wife designed and collated it and printed it locally. Fitzsimons sold these books out of his car to newsagents, petrol garages and bookshops. Over the course of thirty years, Fitzsimons sold over a quarter of a million copies of his catalogue. The first edition contained twenty designs – the final edition contained two hundred and sixty. This guidebook of how to build your own home radically transformed housing in Ireland. Now, for the first time, author and structural engineer Adrian Duncan looks at the cultural impact that Bungalow Bliss and the accessible bungalow design had on the housing market, the Irish landscape, and on the individual families who made these bungalows their homes.

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On Dangerous Ground is the revolutionary period memoir of Republican Máire Comerford (1893–1982). This striking memoir, one of the last of its era, includes Comerford’s original text, written mainly in the 1940s and ’50s, and new material unearthed from her extensive archive that also contains a wealth of photographs and memorabilia from the period. The memoir begins with Comerford’s recollection of Sunday strolls to Avondale, former home of Charles Stewart Parnell, who was a neighbour of her father, the mill owner James Comerford. As a young woman, she experiences a ‘political awakening’ at the hands of a fierce Unionist woman in a secretarial college in London. Máire Comerford (the only Catholic in the class) begins to engage with Irish history books to counterbalance this brush with religious sectarianism. On her return to County Wexford to live with her mother’s people – a move necessitated by the family’s change of fortune – she re-enters the genteel world of fox hunting and luncheon parties. The memoir paints an intriguing picture of rural life of the time heralding the arrival of the motorcar, social and economic conditions, the rise of the Gaelic League, debates about Home Rule, and the First World War. While the description of her surroundings as a young adult is intriguing and often charming, change is in the air in Ireland and a sharp and wide-ranging political analysis is ever present throughout her writing. Following Comerford’s witness account of Dublin during the 1916 Rising, she begins a life of political engagement, joining Cumann na mBan, Sinn Féin and the Gaelic League. In 1919, she moves permanently to Dublin to live with and work for renowned historian and nationalist, Alice Stopford Green. There, she becomes immersed in Republican politics and the War of Independence. Comerford’s memoir gives voice to the experience of Republican women during revolutionary times, highlighting the immense contribution of women in the struggle for an Irish Republic. She works all over the country, moving arms, carrying dispatches, finding safe houses, researching atrocities and working assiduously for Ireland. She experiences raids, prison vigils, funerals of her comrades and dangers of all kinds, but nothing cuts as deep as the sense of utter betrayal following the signing of the Treaty in 1922. Comerford takes the anti-Treaty side, is imprisoned a number of times and endures a 27-day hunger strike. Following her release, she leaves Ireland on a tour of east coast American cities to raise funds for the Republican cause at the behest of de Valera. She returns to a harsh, poverty-stricken and lonely existence, eking out a living on a hilltop poultry farm in Wexford. But while her memoir ends in bleak times, her overarching vision suggests an unquenchable optimism – and that the fight will go on. An epilogue by the editor chronicles the years between 1927 and her death.

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This timely and important intervention in the debates concerning Europe in Ireland begins with the 1916 Centenary celebration. The Brexit decision of June 2016 has fundamentally altered Ireland's relationship with the European Union and has exponentially increased interest in European matters in public debates. Yet, public discussions regarding Ireland's closer links with the European Union often remain purely utilitarian and economic, or take place solely within academia. There is an urgent need to broaden the debate towards the cultural and social spheres, which includes highlighting the inherently European quality of Irish culture and society, in the past as much as the present. The most extensive interventions on these issues in recent years have come from the President of Ireland. This edition collects all of the major speeches on the topic of Europe since 2016. They encompass interventions on historical aspects, bilateral cultural links, citizens' involvement in the European project, workers' rights and ecological concerns. The present Covid-19 crisis will further move the European Union into the limelight, in particular its role in helping member states cope with the consequences of this unprecedented disaster. President Higgins addresses the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918-19 from a speech made in May 2019 and considers the role of European leaders in a letter to the President of the Hellenic Republic in April 2020. These speeches are marked by the President's particular and personal stamp, while also expressing central concerns on behalf of Irish citizens. The speeches are enhanced by a Foreword written by President Michael D. Higgins.

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The new book from critically acclaimed writer, Declan Murphy. ‘As I study the birds, animals and plants around me, I cannot help but see the patterns all living things seem driven to create.’ Declan Murphy’s first encounter with a kingfisher as a young boy was unforgettable. Returning to the rivers years later, he embarks on a quest to study this most brightly-coloured bird during its nesting season, a seemingly straightforward challenge. But the river is slow to reveal the habits and secrets of its residents. Dippers, goosanders, grey wagtails and great spotted woodpeckers all yield their hidden habits to the author’s patient pursuit; yet the kingfisher continues to elude him. In this work of rare calibre in the mould of the great contemporary nature writers Robert Macfarlane, Helen Macdonald and Tim Robinson, the author’s retreat into the natural world is not simply for the sake of knowledge: nature is his remedy for managing the world around him. Since childhood, nature has provided balance, solace and direction. As the search for the kingfisher reaches its culmination, these two spheres, the author’s and the others’, suddenly and unexpectedly collide, forcing him to confront how he sees the world and leading to a resolution where balance is restored through the power and intervention of nature. Writing with hallucinatory clarity and singular powers of observation, he brings the beauty and mystery of the animal kingdom to light. His quest becomes the reader’s in the unfolding drama of his search for harmony and knowledge, from mythography to an acute awareness of people’s fragility.

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W. B. Yeats believed that a poet's life should be an experiment in living. His poems fashion into memorable words the sometimes puzzling emotions that hover over important life events. Yeats's remarkable work can clarify our own thinking about similar situations. Joseph M. Hassett's Yeats Now: Echoing into Life extracts and distils the rich harvest of Yeats's experiment. As Yeats's biographer Roy Foster comments, Yeats Now is 'a personal, quizzical, imaginative testament that ranges through Yeats's thought and writings, showcasing and discussing a series of ringing statements, suggestions and aphorisms that evolve into a kind of vade-mecum or guide to life. The subjects cover love, anger, friendship, politics, violence and the competing claims of perfecting the life, or the work'. This book is a wonderful companion to the work of this significant poet. Hassett's writing provides an excellent frame of context through which to explore one of Ireland's greatest poets.

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Skelligs Haul is a generous compilation of Michael Kirby's prose and poetry, appealing for his simple, elegant style, his knowledge of unique local lore, and his inimitable observations. Kirby, a man who spent nearly every day of his ninety-nine years on the beautiful Iveragh peninsula, apart from a brief period in the United States, knew better than most that survival demanded persistence, passion, civility and good humour. In the shadow of the World Heritage site of Skellig Michael, he eked out a living fishing and farming with intimate knowledge of every inch of sea and soil. This volume, organised thematically, demonstrates Kirby's great gift of expressing the artist's fresh, passionate insight in elegant, plain language and with the dispassionate slant of a scientist. His knowledge of local birds and fish was as encyclopaedic and forensic as his grasp of place names. Referred to as `one of the last authentic expressions of the Gaelic tradition, artlessly fusing the worlds of flesh and spirit', he was a mystic who found his God, his solace and serenity in every living thing in Iveragh. This book includes some dual texts of poems freely translated from Irish by Kirby, showing that his inward eye led to verse in both the romantic vein and the fine tradition of Irish-language religious verse. This collection also presents reproductions of his landscape paintings, an introduction by poet Paddy Bushe and an editor's preface and note.

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In a collection of one hundred photographs Kim Haughton’s new body of work Portrait of a Century offers a stunning portrait of contemporary Ireland as it reflects upon the centenary of the nation’s birth in 1916. Resilience, intimacy, youth – these photographs portray an Ireland at the precipice of change in the knowledge of the strength, dignity, and weight of its past. The poet, the sporting hero, the hopeful youth and nostalgic aged – Haughton’s vision of Ireland is one eclipsing past and present, a vision of the Irish nation seen through the prism of its people. This is the Ireland portrayed in Kim Haughton’s Portrait of a Century. Between 2015 and 2016, one hundred people were invited to participate in Portrait of a Century, each born in a different year, beginning with T. K Whitaker (b. 1916) and ending in 2015. The resulting images are a fascinating depiction of contemporary Ireland as it is reflected in the diversity of its people and sense of nationhood and culture today. In examining the scope of change that has shaped the land since its inception in 1916, Haughton suceeds in delivering an honest, and hopeful, portrait of the nation as it is poised at this moment in time.

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The annual exhibitions of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, founded in 1823 and still active today, provided a bridge between the Irish artist and the public, including critics and collectors. The Academy also ran the main art school for aspiring artists in the nineteenth century. During the Easter Rising of 1916 its galleries and school in Lower Abbey Street were destroyed by fire. It survived in borrowed space, but faced major challenges from modernism in the visual arts. By the end of the twentieth century it had redefined its role in its new gallery in Ely Place, opened, still incomplete, in 1985. The narrative of this stunning compendium is one of change, conflict and adaption. The book is divided into two volumes that describe two different political, social and artistic worlds: Volume One (1823-1916), and Volume Two (1916-2010).

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Justin Keating, son of the artist Sean Keating, attended UCD and TCD. He was a Labour Party politician (Minister for Industry 1973-77), academic, journalist, veterinary surgeon, television pioneer (as Head of Agricultural Broadcasting at RTE) and award-winning documentary filmmaker. In later life he served as Member of the European Parliament and became president of the Humanist Association. President Michael D. Higgins called him ‘a man who saw socialism as both essential and adaptable to change’. Keating introduced the first substantial legislation for the development of Ireland's oil and gas, set up the National Film Studios of Ireland at Ardmore and gave impetus to Kilkenny Design. He wrote extensively – and with opinions well ahead of his time – on the natural world, including women’s health, animal welfare, sustainable energy and ecology. ‘A well made, fit thoroughbred really striding out seems to me one of the most beautiful things on earth, on a par with an orchid or porpoise.’ Edited posthumously by his wife, Barbara Hussey, Justin Keating’s notebooks offer an in-depth, often-impassioned account of the interests, musings and opinions of one of Ireland’s most wide-ranging intellectuals. His dealings with J.D Bernal, Noël Browne, Sean McBride, Charles Haughey, Gerry Fitt and Conor Cruise-O’Brien, form part of this absorbing chronicle, aside from myriad friendships with writers and artists. Nothing Is Written in Stone is a brilliant selfportrait of this multi-dimensional man, who did so much to shape twenty-first century Ireland.

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Remembered in his native Ireland primarily as a harpsichordist and interpreter of Bach’s music, and in the UK as a conductor of the ground-shaking early music group Musica Reservata, John Beckett also composed avant-garde incidental music, performed on several instruments and was an authoritative, if controversial, conductor. Music was not his only passion: he was interested in films, the theatre, art and pottery, and loved to travel. His varied career included devising music programmes for Radio Éireann, writing for The Bell magazine, working in Dublin’s Pike Theatre, presenting and performing for the BBC Third Programme, composing music for his famous cousin Samuel Beckett, founding Musica Reservata, conducting Bach cantata concerts in Dublin over a ten-year period, and working as a producer and presenter for BBC Radio 3. Despite his reputation as a gruff, confrontational individual with a fondness for Guinness, whiskey and garlic, he made many friends and was familiar with Dublin’s intellectual, musical and bohemian milieu, such as the writers Aidan Higgins, Anthony Cronin, Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan and James Plunkett, composers E.J. Moeran and Frederick May, counter-tenor Alfred Deller, musician John O’Sullivan, Desmond MacNamara, Ralph Cusack, singer and sculptor Werner Schürmann, publisher John Calder and musician David Cairns. Complex, self-deprecating and private, John’s character and achievements are examined with detail garnered from information both published and in archival collections in Ireland and the UK. Recollections from those who knew him at different stages of his life enliven this fascinating biography. The book also examines the development of Musica Reservata, and contains excerpts from unpublished letters written by Samuel Beckett. Extracts from correspondence between John and James Plunkett, Aidan Higgins, Arland Ussher and music critic Charles Acton are also included.

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The Abode of Fancy tells the story of a young Dublin man, Simeon Collins – lonely and desperate for love – whose friendships with a loosely associated group of elderly, alcoholic men yield a grim picture of his own probable future life. It also tells the story of the Mad Monk, a mythical god-man, who returns to Ireland, eager to find his long-dead brother Elijah. And then there’s the lovesick hare, the ghostly skeletal bull, and the barmy banshee Maggie Nutmeg Devlin. As the stories progress, the two worlds draw closer and closer, interweaving to fuse reality and fantasy in an exhilarating extravaganza that explores the nature of loneliness, the impossibility of love, and the possible consolations of friendship. This is an elaborate literary novel, sure to garner a cult following, drawing together Irish traditions of linguistic whimsy and ironic fantasy, with a modern hysterical realist style. Coll has an unmistakably distinctive voice, and with unrivalled linguistic flair he expertly combines the tenderness and simplicity of a child with the cynicism and gloom of an old man. The Abode of Fancy is an auspicious debut and a hilarious, heartbreaking and jaw-dropping read. Extracts from the novel have been featured in Granta and The Stinging Fly

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‘Hendrik Fagel the Younger (1765–1838), Greffier or Chief Minister of Holland, had the misfortune to have his property seized by invading French forces in the winter of 1794–5, but managed to secure the release of his family art collection and library, which were shipped to him in London in 1798. Being in straitened circumstances he decided to sell them and negotiations took place for the purchase of the library for Trinity College.’ So begins Charles Benson’s introduction to Frozen in Time, a collection of the papers presented at the recent Fagel Symposium, held at Trinity College, Dublin, with the explicit purpose of making this astonishing resource better known outside College walls. During their two centuries of public service to the States-General and Holland, the Fagel family built up one of the most important private libraries in early modern Europe, with holdings in history, politics and law as well as every other area of human endeavour: belles lettres, philosophy and theology, geography and travel, natural history and the visual arts. This lavishly illustrated volume contains a selection of the papers presented at the symposium as well as new articles, covering subjects as diverse as early Dutch book collections and plans of the cosmos, botanical sales catalogues, pamphlets on the bloody 1641 Rebellion in Ireland, Italian Renaissance poetry and the vicissitudes of the Huguenots. As the first comprehensive study of this hugely important and hitherto relatively unknown collection – one of the most important private libraries in early modern Europe – the volume will be of immense value to scholars and general readers.

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A collection of twelve mint fresh stories from the award winning Irish author, described by Neil Jordan as 'the real thing - a writer of great originality, dramatic flair, linguistic invention - who remakes the world every time he puts pen to paper.' These tales lead the reader around the fringes of Irish society through the eyes of the marginalized.

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A memoir like no other, A Single Headstrong Heart passionately and intelligently reveals both the era and the individual. Funny, quirky and touching, this latest offering from Kevin Myers describes in a first-person narrative his childhood up to the early years of his career as a journalist and his departure from University College Dublin in the late 1960s. Related with a Rabelaisian verve, A Single Headstrong Heart is a prequel to Myers’ bestselling Watching the Door, set in Belfast at the height of the Troubles during the 1970s, and it has all the panache and particularity of that masterly book. As they grow up in Leicestershire, England, with regular holiday visits to Ireland, Kevin and his twin sister Maggie are sheltered by a mother’s domestic diligence and survive a father’s eccentricity and gradual disintegration. Being Irish and Catholic in an English provincial town brings fascinating tensions and analysis to bear on boarding school experiences, social status, sport and a burgeoning sexuality. The travails of puberty have rarely been so candidly depicted. Pop music, political awareness and modernity break in with the advent of the Sixties and modernity as this rare, ebullient personality undergoes social and political transformation. With a sometimes grotesque humour reminiscent of Roald Dahl, these recollections retain an authentic childlike sense of galloping self-importance in an adult re-casting. Broadly chronological, the main narrative arc is sustained by the author’s relationship with his father, with a startling denouement revealed after his father’s death that lends context to these vivid memories.

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The Strangled Impulse follows a young curate uprooted from a comfortable parish to serve the pastoral needs of working-class North Dublin. Set against the backdrop of the Church's dwindling influence in 1970s Ireland and an increased scrutiny of priests' personal lives, this is the story of Father O'Neill's battles between the demands of his vocation and his own desires. His loneliness leads him to an attractive yet wounded woman, and together they find a solace they once thought impossible. As O'Neill struggles with the promises he made on ordination day, their newfound intimacy threatens to destro them both.William King's daring first novel offers an insight into the conflicted, political, brotherly world of the priesthood. Re-issued for the first time since its publication in 1997, it is augmented with an afterword by the author reflecting on his work.

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HEADFORT SCHOOL has always been an idiosyncratic place. Beginning as an ‘outpost of Empire’ at a time when that empire was locally destitute and internationally disintegrating, it prepared the sons of the landed classes for the ‘great public schools’. Weaving its way around the Headfort family and its successors as landlord, the School has traced a rapidly evolving educational ethos. It has managed to protect its individuality and excellence, whilst staunchly refusing to adopt any of the more illogical conclusions of a changing society. Your Children are not your Children is more than a book about a school. It treats such universal issues as co-education, competition, bad language, bullying and homesickness. It reveals the development of Headfort through portraits of the colourful characters on its staff, anecdotes of pupils from every era and accounts of their lurid pranks. The story is augmented by extracts from the ‘Headmaster’s Newsletter’, revealing his thinking about children and education at different stages of his 24-year headmastership, and his startling hatred of political correctness. Told in the inimitable style of Lingard Goulding, whose voice sums up so well the School he served, this book is an engaging account of a living community.

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Seventy Years Young is one of the great Anglo-Irish memoirs. Originally published in 1937, it now appears for the first time in paperback, with an introduction by Trevor West. It tells the remarkable story of Daisy Fingall (nee Burke) of County Galway, who in 1883, aged seventeen, married the 11th Earl of Fingall of Killeen Castle, County Meath. Daisy’s vitality possessed and transformed that twilit world of Catholic Ascendancy Ireland, a world in transition – from viceregal, country-house Ireland of Dublin drawing-rooms and Meath hunting-fields, now as remote as pre-revolutionary Russia – to the Great War, Easter rising and civil war Ireland of the early 1920s and beyond, when ‘the country houses lit a chain of bonfires’, and the tobacco-growing ‘Sinn Fein Countess’ tempered a life of privilege with work for Horace Plunkett’s Co-operative Societies and the United Irishwomen. Daisy Fingall writes from an intimate knowledge of the leading figures of her day and their milieu. A sparkling parade of personalities – Parnell, Wyndham, Haig, Markievicz, Edward VII, AE, Shaw, Moore and Yeats – comes alive under her pen. Seventy Years Young reanimates a proximate but forgotten past with all the power of first-class fiction, and the glitter and rarity of a Faberge egg.

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With Barry Flanagan is a vivid account of a friendship that evolved into a working relationship when Richard McNeff became ‘spontaneous fixer’ (Flanagan’s description) of the sculptor’s show held in June 1992 at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Ibiza, where they were both living. McNeff was to gain a privileged insight into the sculptor’s singular personality and eccentric working methods, learning to decipher his memorably surreal turns of phrase and to parry his fascinating, if at times unsettling, pranksteresque quirks. In September 1992 Flanagan and McNeff took the show to Majorca, resulting in a lively visit to the celebrated Spanish artist Miquel Barcelo. The following year McNeff was involved in Flanagan’s print-making venture in Barcelona and in his Madrid retrospective. Flanagan rescued him from a rough landing in England in 1994 by commissioning a tour of stone quarries there.Subsequently McNeff ran into a fourteen-year-old profoundly deaf girl who turned out to be his unknown daughter. She had a talent for art and the generous sculptor was instrumental in helping with her studies. Late in 2008 Barry was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. By June 2009 he was wheelchair-bound. Two months later he died, and McNeff read the lesson at his funeral. Fleshed out with biographical detail, much of it supplied by the sculptor himself, this touching memoir is the first retrospective of a major Welsh-born artist. Photographs of him as well as of his drawings and sculpture fully complement the text. With Barry Flanagan captures the spirit of this remarkable Merlinesque figure in a moving portrait that reveals a true original.

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Ernie O’Malley was a revolutionary republican and writer. One of the leading figures in the Irish independence and civil wars, he survived wounds, imprisonment and hunger strike, before going to the USA in 1928 to fundraise on de Valera’s behalf. Broken Landscapes tells of his subsequent journeys, through Europe and the Americas, where O’Malley moved in wide social circles that included Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Hart Crane and Jack B. Yeats. Back in Mayo he took up farming. In 1935 he married Helen Hooker, an American heiress, with whom he had three children, Cathal, Etain and Cormac, before a bitter separation. His literary reputation was established with a magnificent memoir, On Another Man’s Wound (1936). In later years he was close to John Ford, and worked on The Quiet Man (1952). This vibrant new collection of letters, diaries and fragments opens up the broad panorama of his life to readers. It enriches the history of Ireland’s troubled independence with reflections on loss and reconciliation. It links the old world to the new – O’Malley perched on the edge of the Atlantic, a folklore collector, art critic and radio broadcaster; autodidact, modernist and intellectual. It conducts a unique conversation with the past. In Broken Landscapes, we travel with O’Malley through Italy, the American Southwest, Mexico and points inbetween. In Taos, he mingled wiht the artistic set around D. H. Lawrence. In Ireland, he drank with Patrick Kavanagh, Liam O’Flaherty and Louis MacNiece. The young painter Louis le Brocquy was his guest on his farm in Burrishoole, Co. Mayo. These places and people remained with O’Malley in his private writing, assembled for the first time from family and institutional archives. Reading these letters, dairies and fragments is to see Ireland in the tumultuous world of the twentieth century, as if for the first time, allowing us to view the intellectual foundations of the State through the eyes of its leading chronicler.

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Part-time Writer guides the reader through all aspects of writing – from the embryonic stages of researching and planning, to the hard slog of the writing and editing, through to the presentation of the manuscript, and finally, approaching agents and publishers. At each stage, the author explains how she did it – and how the reader can do it too. * How can I write engaging dialogue? * What can I do to make my characters ‘live’ on the page? * Must I always ‘show and not tell’? * How can I transform a hobby into a book? * When is the right time to show my work to others? * How should I present my manuscript? * Do I need an agent? * Should I self-publish? * Where can I find the time to write a novel? In her inimitable style, Marjorie Quarton merges literary memoir, anecdotes and straight talking to provide invaluable insights into the realities of being a writer, while offering indispensable advice on the trade, making this book a must-have for any aspiring author.

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The Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig celebrates a quarter of a century this year and marks this important milestone with the launch of a beautiful volume, ‘Annaghmakerrig‘. The Centre is an artists’ retreat set amid the lakes and drumlins of County Monaghan. An eclectic and varied list of poets, musicians, actors, directors and visual artists use the space to develop what we see on stages, pages and gallery walls throughout the country. The book is a collection and a collage that captures the essence and history of the centre, as well as the stories of its fascinating and somewhat eccentric families, not to mention the creativity of the five thousand artists who have spent time there since it was opened by Brian Friel in 1981. In the book. Eugene McCabe remembers Tony Guthrie the theatre director, while Joseph Hone provides a touching and powerful childhood memoir. Other contributors include Colm Toibin, John Banville, Gerald Barry, Anne Enright, Joseph O’Connor, Paul Muldoon, Patrick Scott, Alice Maher, Rosita Boland, Tim Robinson and Claire Keegan. The book is edited by SHEILA PRATSCHKE, Director of Annaghmakerrig, with works selected by RUAIRI O CUIV (visual art) and EVELYN CONLON (literature).

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

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A powerful and authoritative selection of critical essays and reviews by poet Padraic Fallon. Skilfully compiled and edited by his son Brian Fallon, this book is published to mark the centenary of his father’s birth, and testifies to the enduring value of literature in the flux of the twenty-first century. Padraic Fallon (1905 – 1974), one of the foremost Irish poets of his generation and a prolific writer of radio plays, was also an active essay-reviewer in the leading periodicals of his day. His literary criticism was incisive and witty, his erudition lightly worn. Disinterred from old files of The Bell, The Dublin Magazine and The Irish Times, his work remains fresh and readable decades on. Fallon writes authoritatively about the key figures of the Literary Revival: Gregory, Yeats, Stephans, Synge, Shaw and O’Casey – he knew many of them – and also of his contemporaries F.R. Higgins and Austin Clarke, with whom he shared a dedicated engagement with the Irish tradition. He comines frank judgements of Eliot, Pound, Graves, Auden, Gunn, Lowell, Larkin, Kinsella and others with fascinating detours into an East Galway childhood and the folk memories of Antony Raftery. The book is built around a core of previously uncollected work, beginning with the controversial, highly influential ‘Poet’s Journal’ (The Bell, 1951-2) and closing with the wide-ranging ‘Verse Chronicles’ (Dublin Magazine, 1956-8).

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