Yeats’s interest in Berkeley developed in the 1920s in the context of his appointment to the Irish senate, where he saw himself as a spokesman for the old Protestant previously largely Unionist ascendancy caste. In this context he built up…

Post-Good Friday Agreement rhetoric about the historic “symbiotic bond” between Ireland and England presupposes that both parties were equal beneficiaries of this supposed symbiosis and can lead imperceptibly to a blurring of the conflict, violence, trauma and catastrophe involved in…

It was this man [Edmund Veesenmayer, an agent of the German foreign service] that Kerney met in Madrid in August 1942, without instruction, but probably arising from his role in the freeing of Frank Ryan. Kerney was clearly aware that…

Denis Healey once quipped of Shirley Williams that she needn’t think herself an intellectual just because she had a bad hairdo: Zhemchuzhina would have agreed. Unlike the dishevelled and independent-minded feminists of the Old Bolshevik milieu, by the mid-1930s women…

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, thousands of Christian converts and missionaries were executed, some of them crucified. In 1637-8, the government suppressed a rebellion of Catholic Samurai warriors and peasants with great brutality and drove the remaining…

Built in 1974, it was put up by Robert McAlpine, who relied on many of those “fusiliers” who had come to Birmingham from Ireland and who played such a key role in constructing the culture and identity of the modern…

It is important to distinguish the harms intrinsically connected to drug use from the many harms in addition to the creation of a lucrative criminal black market in drugs that are actually caused by prohibition. Prohibition-induced ignorance, confusion and rashness…

Highly promiscuous, he was unfaithful to all his women, and never – quite – managed to love anyone else as much as he loved himself. He was chauvinistic and seemed to have very little respect for women – Rebecca West…

A political response that would disengage from the demands of financial markets that are by definition volatile and oriented towards short-term profit is urgently needed from EU leaders. Their historical failure to react decisively, with clarity as well as vision,…

Gaps in personal biography are more than compensated for by O’Sullivan’s reassembly of the social and political networks inhabited by the O’Kelly brothers which, in their early years in Dublin and London, included John Devoy, James Clancy and Joe Clarke….

Although Mrs Thatcher professes to have found Mr Haughey easier to deal with than Dr FitzGerald, at the time … she had a high regard for his honesty of purpose and indeed (so it seemed to me) even a degree…