Download or read book Heroic Failure written by Fintan O'Toole and published by Apollo. This book was released on 2019-09 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A wildly entertaining but uncomfortable read ... Pitilessly brilliant' JONATHAN COE. 'There will not be much political writing in this or any other year that is carried off with such style' The Times. A TIMESBOOK OF THE YEAR. 'A quite brilliant dissection of the cultural roots of the Brexit narrative'David Miliband. 'Hugely entertaining and engrossing'Roddy Doyle. 'Best book about the English that I've read for ages'Billy Bragg. A fierce, mordantly funny and perceptive book about the act of national self-harm known as Brexit. A great democratic country tears itself apart, and engages in the dangerous pleasures of national masochism. Trivial journalistic lies became far from trivial national obsessions; the pose of indifference to truth and historical fact came to define the style of an entire political elite; a country that once had colonies redefined itself as an oppressed nation requiring liberation. Fintan O'Toole also discusses the fatal attraction of heroic failure, once a self-deprecating cult in a hugely successful empire that could well afford the occasional disaster. Now failure is no longer heroic - it is just failure, and its terrible costs will be paid by the most vulnerable of Brexit's supporters. A new afterword lays out the essential reforms that are urgently needed if England is to have a truly democratic future and stable relations with its nearest neighbours.
Download or read book Modern Ireland written by R. F. Foster and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 1989 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masterfully blending narrative and interpretation, and R.F. Foster's Modern Ireland: 1600-1972 looks at how key events in Irish history contributed to the creation of the 'Irish Nation'. 'The most brilliant and courageous Irish historian of his generation' Colm Tóibín, London Review of Books 'Remarkable ... Foster gives a wise and balanced account of both forces of unity and forces of diversity ... a master work of scholarship' Bernard Crick, New Statesman 'A tour de force ... Anyone who really wants to make sense of Ireland and the Irish must read Roy Foster's magnificent and accessible Modern Ireland' Anthony Clare 'A magnificent book. It supersedes all other accounts of modern Irish history' Conor Cruise O'Brien, Sunday Times 'Dazzling ... a masterly survey not so much of the events of Irish history over the past four centuries as of the way in which those events acted upon the peoples living in Ireland to produce in our own time an "Irish Nation" ... a gigantic and distinguished undertaking' Robert Kee, Observer 'A work of gigantic importance. It is everything that a history book should be. It is beautifully and clearly written; it seeps wisdom through its every pore; it is full of the most elegant and scholarly insights; it is magnificently authoritative and confident ... Modern Ireland is quite simply the single most important book on Irish history written in this generation ... A masterpiece' Kevin Myers, Irish Times R. F. Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. His books include Modern Ireland: 1600-1972, Luck and the Irish and W. B. Yeats: A Life.
Download or read book Ship of Fools written by Fintan O'Toole and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2010-03-02 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The death of the Celtic tiger is not an extinction event to trouble naturalists. There was, in fact nothing natural about this tiger, if it ever really existed. The "Irish Economic miracle" was built on good old-fashioned subsidies (from the European Union) and the simple fact that until the 1980s Ireland was by the standards of the developed world so economically backward that the only way was up. And as it began to catch up to European and American averages, the Irish economy could boast some seemingly remarkable statistics. These lured in investors, the Irish deregulated and all but abandoned financial oversight, and a great Irish financial ceilidh began. It would last for a decade. When the global financial crash of 2008 arrived it struck Ireland harder than anywhere - even Iceland looked like a model of rectitude compared to the fiasco that stretched from Cork to Dublin. There was an avalanche of statistics as toxic as the property-based assets that lay beneath many of them And under all this rubble lay the corpse of the Celtic Tiger. How Ireland managed to achieve such a spectacular implosion is a stunning story of corruption, carelessness and venality, told with passion and fury by one of Ireland's most respected journalists and commentators.
Download or read book White Savage written by Fintan O'Toole and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative new biography of the man who forged America's alliance with the Iroquois William Johnson was scarcely more than a boy when he left Ireland and his Gaelic, Catholic family to become a Protestant in the service of Britain's North American empire. In New York by 1738, Johnson moved to the frontiers along the Mohawk River, where he established himself as a fur trader and eventually became a landowner with vast estates; served as principal British intermediary with the Iroquois Confederacy; command British, colonial, and Iroquois forces that defeated the French in the battle of Lake George in 1755; and created the first groups of "rangers," who fought like Indians and led the way to the Patriots' victories in the Revolution. As Fintan O'Toole's superbly researched, colorfully dramatic narrative makes clear, the key to Johnson's signal effectiveness was the style in which he lived as a "white savage." Johnson had two wives, one European, one Mohawk; became fluent in Mohawk; and pioneered the use of Indians as active partners in the making of a new America. O'Toole's masterful use of the extraordinary (often hilariously misspelled) documents written by Irish, Dutch, German, French, and Native American participants in Johnson's drama enlivens the account of this heroic figure's legendary career; it also suggests why Johnson's early multiculturalism unraveled, and why the contradictions of his enterprise created a historical dead end.
Download or read book Spying on Ireland written by Eunan O'Halpin and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-04-17 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irish neutrality during the Second World War presented Britain with significant challenges to its security. Exploring how British agencies identified and addressed these problems, this book reveals how Britain simultaneously planned sabotage in and spied on Ireland, and at times sought to damage the neutral state's reputation internationally through black propaganda operations. It analyses the extent of British knowledge of Axis and other diplomatic missions in Ireland, and shows the crucial role of diplomatic code-breaking in shaping British policy. The book also underlines just how much Ireland both interested and irritated Churchill throughout the war. Rather than viewing this as a uniquely Anglo-Irish experience, Eunan O'Halpin argues that British activities concerning Ireland should be placed in the wider context of intelligence and security problems that Britain faced in other neutral states, particularly Afghanistan and Persia. Taking a comparative approach, he illuminates how Britain dealt with challenges in these countries through a combination of diplomacy, covert gathering of intelligence, propaganda, and intimidation. The British perspective on issues in Ireland becomes far clearer when discussed in terms of similar problems Britain faced with neutral states worldwide. Drawing heavily on British and American intelligence records, many disclosed here for the first time, Eunan O'Halpin presents the first country study of British intelligence to describe and analyse the impact of all the secret agencies during the war. He casts fresh light on British activities in Ireland, and on the significance of both espionage and cooperation between intelligence agencies for developing wider relations between the two countries.
Download or read book This Day in Irish History written by Padraic Coffey and published by The O'Brien Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-09-13 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You may know all about the Easter Rising and the Good Friday Agreement, but did you know that the hypodermic needle was invented in Tallaght? Or that Dublin was the first city in the world to have a woman stockbroker, decades before London or New York? Or that the formula used to create the video game Tomb Raider was sketched on a bridge in Cabra in the nineteenth century? With one entry for every day of the year, this book marks the anniversaries of momentous events in Irish history: in politics, medicine, music, sport and innovation. In this accessible, comprehensive and authoritative book, discover the moments that have helped to shape the national identity of Ireland.
Download or read book My Father Left Me Ireland written by Michael Brendan Dougherty and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The perfect gift for parents this Father’s Day: a beautiful, gut-wrenching memoir of Irish identity, fatherhood, and what we owe to the past. “A heartbreaking and redemptive book, written with courage and grace.” –J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy “…a lovely little book.” –Ross Douthat, The New York Times The child of an Irish man and an Irish-American woman who split up before he was born, Michael Brendan Dougherty grew up with an acute sense of absence. He was raised in New Jersey by his hard-working single mother, who gave him a passion for Ireland, the land of her roots and the home of Michael's father. She put him to bed using little phrases in the Irish language, sang traditional songs, and filled their home with a romantic vision of a homeland over the horizon. Every few years, his father returned from Dublin for a visit, but those encounters were never long enough. Devastated by his father's departures, Michael eventually consoled himself by believing that fatherhood was best understood as a check in the mail. Wearied by the Irish kitsch of the 1990s, he began to reject his mother's Irish nationalism as a romantic myth. Years later, when Michael found out that he would soon be a father himself, he could no longer afford to be jaded; he would need to tell his daughter who she is and where she comes from. He immediately re-immersed himself in the biographies of firebrands like Patrick Pearse and studied the Irish language. And he decided to reconnect with the man who had left him behind, and the nation just over the horizon. He began writing letters to his father about what he remembered, missed, and longed for. Those letters would become this book. Along the way, Michael realized that his longings were shared by many Americans of every ethnicity and background. So many of us these days lack a clear sense of our cultural origins or even a vocabulary for expressing this lack--so we avoid talking about our roots altogether. As a result, the traditional sense of pride has started to feel foreign and dangerous; we've become great consumers of cultural kitsch, but useless conservators of our true history. In these deeply felt and fascinating letters, Dougherty goes beyond his family's story to share a fascinating meditation on the meaning of identity in America.
Download or read book Sorry for Your Trouble written by Ann Marie Hourihane and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Irish do death differently. Funeral attendance is a solemn duty - but it can also be a big day out, requiring sophisticated crowd control, creative parking solutions and a high-end sound system. Despite having the same basic end-of-life infrastructure as other Western countries, Irish culture handles death with a unique blend of dignified ritual and warm sociability. In Sorry for Your Trouble, Ann Marie Hourihane holds up a mirror to the Irish way of death: the funny bits, the sad bits, and the hard-to-explain bits that tell us so much about who we are. She follows the last weeks of a woman's life in hospice; she witnesses an embalming; she attends inquests; she talks to people working to prevent suicide; she follows the team of specialists working to locate the remains of people 'disappeared' by the IRA; and she visits some of Ireland's most contested graves. She also explores the strange and sometimes surprising histories of Irish death practices, from the traditional wake and ritual lamentations to the busy commerce between anatomists and bodysnatchers. And she goes to funerals, of ordinary and extraordinary people all over the country - including that of her own father. 'I had joined a club,' she writes, 'the club of people who have lost someone very close to them.' And then, with her family, she sets about planning a funeral in the middle of a pandemic. Sorry for Your Trouble sheds fresh, wise and witty light on a key pillar of Irish culture: a vast but strangely underexplored subject. Rich, sparkling and eye-opening, it is one of the best books ever written about Irish life. ___________________________ 'A beautiful, insightful reflection on a very, very peculiar country's approach to the oddest experience of them all' RYAN TUBRIDY 'Hugely moving and illuminating. All of life, somehow, is here' TANYA SWEENEY, IRISH INDEPENDENT 'Moving, comforting and funny' BUSINESS POST
Download or read book The Deal from Hell written by James O'Shea and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2012-08-28 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2000, after the Tribune Company acquired Times Mirror Corporation, it comprised the most powerful collection of newspapers in the world. How then did Tribune nosedive into bankruptcy and public scandal? In The Deal From Hell, veteran Tribune and Los Angeles Times editor James O'Shea takes us behind the scenes of the decisions that led to disaster in boardrooms and newsrooms from coast to coast, based on access to key players, court testimony, and sworn depositions. The Deal From Hell is a riveting narrative that chronicles how news industry executives and editors--convinced they were acting in the best interests of their publications--made a series of flawed decisions that endangered journalistic credibility and drove the newspapers, already confronting a perfect storm of political, technological, economic, and social turmoil, to the brink of extinction.
Download or read book The Lie of the Land written by Fintan O'Toole and published by Verso. This book was released on 1998 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lie of the Land is a highly engaging study of Ireland's fractured and shifting identities by one of its most talented writers. From its sometimes confused sense of place, caught somewhere between Europe and America, Ireland has redefined itself in the 1990s. Fintan O'Toole highlights the contradictions and the mythologies at work in Ireland's ever-changing idea of itself.
Download or read book How the Irish Saved Civilization written by Thomas Cahill and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-04-28 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A book in the best tradition of popular history—the untold story of Ireland's role in maintaining Western culture while the Dark Ages settled on Europe. • The perfect St. Patrick's Day gift! Every year millions of Americans celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but they may not be aware of how great an influence St. Patrick was on the subsequent history of civilization. Not only did he bring Christianity to Ireland, he instilled a sense of literacy and learning that would create the conditions that allowed Ireland to become "the isle of saints and scholars"—and thus preserve Western culture while Europe was being overrun by barbarians. In this entertaining and compelling narrative, Thomas Cahill tells the story of how Europe evolved from the classical age of Rome to the medieval era. Without Ireland, the transition could not have taken place. Not only did Irish monks and scribes maintain the very record of Western civilization -- copying manuscripts of Greek and Latin writers, both pagan and Christian, while libraries and learning on the continent were forever lost—they brought their uniquely Irish world-view to the task. As Cahill delightfully illustrates, so much of the liveliness we associate with medieval culture has its roots in Ireland. When the seeds of culture were replanted on the European continent, it was from Ireland that they were germinated. In the tradition of Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, How The Irish Saved Civilization reconstructs an era that few know about but which is central to understanding our past and our cultural heritage. But it conveys its knowledge with a winking wit that aptly captures the sensibility of the unsung Irish who relaunched civilization.
Download or read book A History of Ireland in 100 Objects written by Fintan O'Toole and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Irish Times literary editor Fintan O'Toole selects 100 objects to narrate a history of Ireland.
Download or read book The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland written by Eugenio F. Biagini and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 651 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first textbook on the history of modern Ireland to adopt a social history perspective. Written by an international team of leading scholars, it draws on a wide range of disciplinary approaches and consistently sets Irish developments in a wider European and global context.
Download or read book A Short History of Ireland 1500 2000 written by John Gibney and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brisk, concise, and readable overview of Irish history from the Protestant Reformation to the dawn of the twenty-first century. Five centuries of Irish history are explored in this informative and accessible volume. Beginning with Ireland’s modern period at the dawn of the sixteenth century, John Gibney continues through to virtually the present day, offering an integrated overview of the island nation’s cultural, political, and socioeconomic evolution. This succinct, scholarly study covers important historical events, including the Cromwellian conquest and settlement, the Great Famine, and the struggle for Irish independence. Along the way, it explores major themes such as Ireland’s often contentious relationship with Britain, the impact of the Protestant Reformation, the ongoing religious tensions it inspired, and the global reach of the Irish diaspora. This unique, wide-ranging work assimilates the most recent scholarship on a wide range of historical controversies, making it an essential addition to the library of any student of Irish studies.
Download or read book We Don t Know Ourselves written by Fintan O'Toole and published by Apollo. This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 Irish Times bestseller WINNER of the An Post Irish Book Awards 'A clear-eyed, myth-dispelling masterpiece' Marian Keyes 'Sweeping, authoritative and profoundly intelligent' Colm Tóibín, Guardian 'With the pace and twists of an enthralling novel' Irish Times 'Evocative, moving, funny and furious' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times 'An enthralling, panoramic book' Patrick Radden Keefe 'A book that will remain important for a very long time' An Post Irish Book AwardWe Don't Know Ourselves is a very personal vision of recent Irish history from the year of O'Toole's birth, 1958, down to the present. Ireland has changed almost out of recognition during those decades, and Fintan O'Toole's life coincides with that arc of transformation. The book is a brilliant interweaving of memories (though this is emphatically not a memoir) and engrossing social and historical narrative. This was the era of Eamon de Valera, Jack Lynch, Charles Haughey and John Charles McQuaid, of sectarian civil war in the North and the Pope's triumphant visit in 1979, but also of those who began to speak out against the ruling consensus - feminists, advocates for the rights of children, gay men and women coming out of the shadows. We Don't Know Ourselves is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand modern Ireland.
Download or read book My Father s Wake written by Kevin Toolis and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate, lyrical look at the ancient rite of the Irish wake--and the Irish way of overcoming our fear of death Death is a whisper for most of us. Instinctively we feel we should dim the lights, pull the curtains, and speak softly. But on a remote island off the coast of Ireland's County Mayo, death has a louder voice. Each day, along with reports of incoming Atlantic storms, the local radio runs a daily roll call of the recently departed. The islanders go in great numbers, young and old alike, to be with their dead. They keep vigil with the corpse and the bereaved company through the long hours of the night. They dig the grave with their own hands and carry the coffin on their own shoulders. The islanders cherish the dead--and amid the sorrow, they celebrate life, too. In My Father's Wake, acclaimed author and award-winning filmmaker Kevin Toolis unforgettably describes his own father's wake and explores the wider history and significance of this ancient and eternal Irish ritual. Perhaps we, too, can all find a better way to deal with our mortality -- by living and loving as the Irish do.
Download or read book Howdie Skelp written by Paul Muldoon and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet delivers a sharp wake-up call with his fourteenth collection. A “howdie-skelp” is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It’s a wake-up call. A call to action. The poems in Howdie-Skelp, Paul Muldoon’s new collection, include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a heroic crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an “affront” to good taste. Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to command our attention.
