France on trial: The case of Marshal Pétain, by Julian Jackson (Allan Lane, £25.00/€29.50) Marshal Philippe Pétain, head of the collaborationist Vichy regime in France during World War II, was put on trial for treason at the end of the war in 1945. It was essentially a show trial, ordered by the provisional government newly installed…
Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics: Judging Dillon and Parnell, by Paul Bew (Oxford University Press, £25.00/ €29.50) The great Irish constitutional nationalist movement of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, with its twin aims of land reform and Home Rule, has been largely disregarded and uncelebrated in the Ireland that emerged from the 1916…
Trieste Joyce School 2023 James Joyce lived in Trieste from 1905 to 1915, albeit with one interval of nine months spent in Rome in 1906-7. He moved to neutral Switzerland because of the First World War in 1915, but returned briefly to Trieste in 1919 before going to Paris where he would remain for almost…
The first great charity of this town: Belfast Charitable Society and its role in the developing city edited by Olwen Purdue (Irish Academic Press, €29.95/£24.99) The Belfast Charitable Society was established in 1752 for the purpose of raising funds to build a poorhouse and hospital for the poor of Belfast. The result was the building…
The recent attack on Salman Rushdie, like the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in 2015, raises fundamental questions about the limits of free speech. There are no easy answers. Those of us who live in liberal democracies are predictably appalled by the very idea of restrictions, formal or otherwise, on our freedom of speech.…
Booth by Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent’s Tail, £14.99) Booth, by the American author Karen Joy Fowler, is a novel about the family of actor Junius Brutus Booth. The most famous – or infamous – of his children was John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. Booth père (1796-1852) was an Englishman who abandoned a wife and…
Great Hatred: The Assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP by Ronan McGreevy (Faber, £16.99/€19.99) Sir Henry Wilson, Ulster Unionist MP at Westminster and former Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), was shot dead by two English-born Irish Republicans – Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan – outside his home in London on June…
Ireland’s Great Famine, Britain’s Great Failure William H. A. Williams (Anthem Press, £80.00/€94.00) It is impossible to write about certain matters, even in a scholarly context, without feelings of outrage. The Irish Famine of 1845-49, the subject of this new book by William H. A. Williams, an American historian who taught at University College Dublin…
Irish lives in America Edited by Liz Evers and Niav Gallagher (Royal Irish Academy, €19.95/£18/$25) On this day every year Irish thoughts turn without fail to our relatives and friends in the United States. In reciprocation, President Joe Biden has this year issued a special proclamation from the White House declaring March 2022 as Irish-American…
Ulysses: a reader’s odyssey by Daniel Mulhall (New Island Books, €15.95) This book is a delightful, chatty introduction to the wonderful world of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It is written by Daniel Mulhall, an Irish diplomat for more than 40 years and now Ireland’s ambassador to the United States of America. In the prologue to his…