Showing titles in Ireland

You scramble up over the dunes of an isolated beach. You climb to the summit of a lonely hill. You pick your way through the eerie hush of a forest. And then you find them. The traces of the past. Perhaps they are marked by a tiny symbol on your map, perhaps not. There are no plaques to explain their fading presence before you, nothing to account for what they once were—who made them, lived in them, or abandoned them. Now they are merged with the landscape. They are being reclaimed by nature. They are wild history.

Fintan O'Toole was born in 1958. His life covers Ireland's journey out of underdevelopment and domination by the Church, to the country's transformation into the relatively prosperous and tolerant society that it is today. But, along the way, there was a sectarian civil war in the North, which cast a dark shadow over the whole island, and bitter struggles for intellectual, civil and sexual freedoms. This is a very personal history by a writer who is considered by many to be the country's leading public intellectual.

The drumbeat of horses’ hooves and clatter of chariot wheels echo through the rolling green hills of what will be known much later as the Emerald Isle. The driver is a lone woman whose long hair and homespun cloak whip through the wind behind her. Headstrong, confident, and intelligent, she blazes a trail that will change her nation forevermore, yet not in her own name or for her own sake, but for that of the God who sent her. This is a woman who will love the poor, feed the hungry, house the homeless, teach the ignorant, and defy the odds doing it all. This is Brigid of Kildare.

The Invention of Childhood explores how gender, geography and ethnicity has impacted the development of children throughout the ages. Beginning from the year 1000, Cunningham studies the many important events in history for our children, ranging from Britain's earliest child-care guru in the Middle Ages to the first ever Foundling Hospital in the 18th Century. This hugely enjoyable piece of teaching that delves into the idea of how childhood has been constantly reinvented through the centuries, and why the role of children in society continues to obsess us today.

An engrossing BBC Radio 4 series spanning the history of the home and domestic relationships over the past 500 years, presented by Amanda Vickery. Professor Vickery is one of the most charismatic historians in Britain today. In 'A History of Private Life' she reveals the intimate secrets of life at home, from the Tudor mansion to the modern bedsit.Through letters, diaries and other first-person accounts, we hear the voices of men and women from very different backgrounds telling their stories.

It's exhausting being Irish. The constant self-flagellation is enough to put anybody off their breakfast. Why are we so hard on ourselves? Is it the postcolonial overhang following centuries of oppression at the hands of a litany of foreign invaders? Or is it collective guilt for sending Westlife out into the wider world? In Surviving Ireland, acclaimed comedy writer Colm Tobin takes the listener by the hand for a satirical romp through modern Irish life.

Oscar Wilde's classic comic ghost story was the first of his short stories to be published, in February 1887. It relates the experiences of Mr. Hiram B. Otis, an American minister, and his family when they move into Canterville Chase, an ancient pile haunted by the previous owner's dead ancestor, Sir Simon. Of course, Mr. Otis declares, "There is no such thing, sir, as a ghost", and all of Sir Simon's hauntings have no effect on the skeptical American family, with the exception of the daughter, Virginia, despite his most strenuous efforts.

The Irish Republican Army–better known as the IRA–has become one of the most infamous and feared paramilitary organisations in the world. Yet little is known about the IRA by the average person on the street.

Three Years in Hell is a mordantly funny and perceptive account of three years in our troubled islands, leading up to the aftermath of Brexit (or not, as it may prove). It includes scathing portraits of the leading characters, including Johnson, and of the strange twists and turns that British politics has taken and the effects on our friends and neighbours.

As the train rattled westward on the outskirts of Dublin, James Berry didn’t stand out amongst his fellow passengers, but they couldn’t see the long, Italian silk rope coiled in the black leather bag by his side, nor the white cap and pinion straps, nor the revolver in his coat pocket. Galway, the winter of 1885. The violent murders of John Moylan, killed on a dark country lane, and Alice Burns, shot dead in the dining room of the Royal Hotel, have shaken the county. Now, following painstaking investigations and charged courtroom drama, justice beckons for the guilty parties.

The Fall of the House of Wilde for the first time places Oscar Wilde as a member of one of the most dazzling Anglo-Irish families of Victorian times and in the broader social, political and religious context. A remarkable and perceptive account, this is a major repositioning of our first modern celebrity, a man whose own fall from grace in a trial as public as his father's marked the end of fin de siècle decadence.

A gripping investigation into one of Irish history's greatest mysteries, Great Hatred reveals the true story behind one of the most significant political assassinations to ever have been committed on British soil. On 22 June 1922, Sir Henry Wilson—the former head of the British army and one of those credited with winning the First World War—was shot and killed by two veterans of that war turned IRA members in what was the most significant political murder to have taken place on British soil for more than a century.

This collection of classic Irish wisdom—in the form of stories, prayers, and proverbs—reveals the creator in the natural world and highlights the importance of the Celtic spiritual heritage.

In their long history of suffering, nothing was ever so terrible as what the Irish endured during the Great Potato Famine that struck the country in the 1840s and produced massive upheaval for several years. While countless numbers of Irish starved, the famine also compelled many to leave, and all the while, the British were exporting enough food from Ireland on a daily basis to prevent the starvation. Over the course of 10 years, the population of Ireland decreased by about 1.5 million people, and taken together, these facts have led to charges as severe as genocide.

In 1913, before there is a rumor of war in Europe, Matthias Wrenn and Con Hatchel, lifelong friends from Ballyrannel in the Irish midlands, decide to see the world at the expense of the king of England and join the British army. A year later, while en route to India, their troop ship is recalled and they soon find themselves in the European slaughterhouse that was World War I.

Gerald of Wales, also called Giraldus Cambrensis or Gerald De Barri ( c. 1146-c. 1223), was the archdeacon of Brecknock and a historian whose accounts of late 12th century Britain and France contain vivid anecdotes about the Christian church, the universities of Paris and Oxford, and about notable clerics. His work, Topographia Hiberniae, is an arresting account of his travels in Ireland, with vivid descriptions of the island’s fauna and flora and its natural beauty.

This introduction to Celtic mythology will serve the novice well - for it is a complicated history with the earliest written records destroyed by the marauding Vikings. The oral tradition harks back to 4000 BCE and is a compilation of myths and cultures of many different peoples. Whatever aspect of this rich, mystical, and lavishly embellished heritage you would like to investigate further, you will find the author has supplied a marker to guide you on your way.

It was a cold and foggy February night in 1983 when a group of armed thieves crept onto Ballymany Stud, near The Curragh in County Kildare, Ireland, to steal Shergar, one of the thoroughbred industry's most renowned stallions. The thieves demanded a hefty ransom for the safe return of one of the most valuable Thoroughbreds in the world, but the ransom was never paid and Shergar's remains have never been found.

In 1936 anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet and journalist Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings set up the Mass Observation Project. The idea was simple: ordinary people would record, in diary form, the events of their everyday lives. An estimated one million pages eventually found their way to the archive - and it soon became clear this was more than anyone could digest. Today, the diaries are stored at the University of Sussex, where, remarkably, most remain unread.

There are very few national relationships quite as complicated and enigmatic as the one that exists between the English and the Irish. For two peoples so interconnected by geography and history, the depth of animosity that is often expressed is difficult at times to understand. At the same time, historic links of family and clan, and common Gaelic roots, have at times fostered a degree of mutual regard, interdependence, and cooperation that is also occasionally hard to fathom. During World War I, for example, Ireland fought for the British Empire as part of that empire.