Whatever you say, say nothing

Göring’s Man

The postwar networks of the Nazi art plunderers and their facilitators

Let the Music Speak

Traditional fiddler Martin Hayes’s journey to musical self-expression

Restless Angel

The greatest songwriter in the Irish tradition in the history of recording

Reds under the Bed

How the secret police bedded in communism in postwar Central Europe

Blood of Spain

In the first half of 1936 there were seventy political killings a month in Spain. This was really nothing new, rather the latest outbreak in…

Our Enemies’ Enemies

How the US and the Vatican combined to help Nazis escape justice

For the Cause

In the mid-1930s, 40,000 men enlisted in the International Brigades to fight fascism in Spain. Many died, while the recollections of some who returned, like…

Betrayal

We should be sceptical when great powers tell us a region is riven by age-old, unresolvable conflicts and hatreds. This was the kind of mystification…

Tales from the Wardrobe

If historian Mark Mazower’s father was a quiet man, his reticence was nothing compared to his father’s. Starting from some diaries found in a wardrobe,…

The Perfect Spy

Working undercover for Moscow in 1930s China, Richard Sorge had to drink cocktails, dance with elegant women and eat in the finest restaurants, affording him…

Steady As She Goes

From 1987 to the intoxicating highs of the Celtic Tiger, peaking in 2008, then crashing, there would be one political certainty in Ireland: most voters…

Friends At War

Was the Irish Civil War really a struggle between social classes?

A Bit of Help, Comrade?

Throughout the 1980s, two left-wing parties, the increasingly ambitious and successful SFWP, later WP, and the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) competed for the favour…

The Red and the Green

Ireland long had two parties competing for the favour of the Soviet Union. One was to remain tiny and irrelevant; the other found that its…

Restless Eric

Eric Hobsbawm, perhaps the most respected of twentieth century historians, still manages to impress from beyond the grave with a wide-ranging tour of culture and…

Challenging the State

The 1970s was a transitional decade for Ireland in which new social movements emerged and the state acted decisively against movements which were prepared to…