Riverrun
A stroll along Dublin’s river Liffey, from Heuston Station, past Eve and Adam’s and out to the bend of the bay, reveals the city’s seventeen and a half bridges and the stories behind them.
The Work of Giants
The architectural profession, peacock-like, has sprung to the fore in modern Ireland. But in Victorian Ireland the heroes were the engineers, and justifiably so.
The Stilled World
Unsentimental, sparing and unspecific, the painter Patrick Pye has sought figurative images to represent symbolically “the archetypes of our humanity” depicted in an alternative universe where expiation has been achieved.
The Wild Harvest
Before the inexorable advance of the conifer, the picking of wild berries on Irish hillsides often provided a welcome seasonal boost in income for poorer rural families.
The Beat on the Streets
From Phil Chevron of the Radiators to Stompin’ George Verschoyle spinning rockabilly hits at the Magnet Bar, it is the evocations of the Dublin music scene that stand out in a new miscellany of pieces on the city’s social and cultural history.
AN IMPERIAL MEDIEVALIST
A collection of essays pays timely tribute to one of the greatest scholars that Ireland has ever produced.
Nurse of the Infant Nation
Alice Milligan, political activist and feminist and the first architect of Ireland’s national theatre movement, died in poverty and was largely forgotten by later generations.
Romancing the Stone
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin put paid to the Georgian and Regency styles and became the premier architect of the Gothic Revival. He designed one of the world’s most instantly recognisable landmarks, the clock tower popularly known as Big Ben. He can rightly be said to have changed the architectural face of Ireland too, his buildings being particularly common in Co Wexford.