Showing 1–18 of 119 results
If the past is another country – what happens when we revisit it, one day a year? Carlo Gébler has done just that. Here is the story of Ireland – from the tail end of the Troubles to the Good Friday agreement, to the glory days of the Celtic Tiger to the recession to Brexit…
Published to coincide with his 85th birthday, Ash Keys looks back on the extraordinary career of the last surviving member of the triumvirate of poets that rose out of 1960s Belfast. The title of Michael Longley’s New Selected Poems is taken from his poem ‘Ash Keys’. The wing-shaped, wind-borne seeds of the ash-tree might be…
A FRIENDSHIP NOTHING COULD DESTROY. Evacuated from Blitz-battered London, the shy Elizabeth White is sent to stay with the O’Connor family in Kilgarret, Ireland, where she strikes up an unlikely friendship with the lively, boisterous Aisling O’Connor. Neither of them were to know it would become the most important friendship of their lives. Their bond…
Originally published in 1925, A Golden Treasury of Irish Verse is an impressive and beautifully crafted collection of the best of Irish poetry from ancient times to the early twentieth century. It features folklore and legend, often beautifully translated from Gaelic with contributions from William Congreve, Thomas Moore, Moira O’Neill, Katharine Tynan, Padraic Colum and…
In 1982 Malcolm Macarthur, the wealthy heir to a small estate, found himself suddenly without money. The solution, he decided, was to rob a bank. To do this, he would need a gun and a car. In the process of procuring them, he killed two people, and the circumstances of his eventual arrest in the…
Recruited by British Intelligence to infiltrate the IRA and Sinn Féin during the height of the Northern Ireland Troubles, they were ‘agents of influence’. With codenames like INFLICTION, STAKEKNIFE, 3007 and CAROL, these spies played a pivotal role in the fight against Irish republicanism. Now, for the first time, some of these agents have emerged…
Tom the lighthouse keeper finds an egg washed up on the beach in West Cork. When it hatches, young Barney Goose lives happily with Tom, until he feels a need to fly! What will Barney find as as he travels the Wild Atlantic Way from West Cork all the way to Donegal? And why does…
In 1904, Casement became internationally celebrated for unearthing the grotesque violence of the Belgian Congo. Soon after he won even greater renown and a knighthood for his humanitarian work deep in the Amazon jungle. But his internal fault lines ran deep: neither fully Irish nor English, baptised both Protestant and Catholic, desperate for love but…
Michael Longley has been called ‘one of the finest lyric poets of our time’. In assembling the work of forty years, his Collected Poems displays a brilliantly sustained achievement whose depth, beauty and wit can now be fully appreciated. Longley’s poetry combines intense concentration with remarkable variety. The formal and thematic range laid down in…
On 27 December 1973 the nightmare began: late that night German businessman Thomas Niedermayer was kidnapped from his home in Belfast. Never seen alive again by his friends or family, he became one of the ‘disappeared’ and it seemed that no one knew what had happened to him. His wife, Ingeborg, and his daughters, Renate…
‘God save all here.’ Summer, 1847. People are getting used to the corpses lying by the road and along the ditches. For John Mitchel – lawyer, journalist, activist, politician – the word ‘famine’ will forever conjure the hollowed faces of Ireland’s dead, the liquid Irish of the past now mute on their tongues. Propelled by…
On Sunday, 26 November 1978, two IRA gunmen kicked in the front door at 8 Evelyn Gardens in Belfast, the home of Maze prison official Albert Miles. They executed Miles in front of his family and vanished into the night. In 1983 twenty-four-year-old Catholic taxi driver Kevin Barry Artt was convicted and sentenced to life…
William Brown knew Ian Paisley from an early age. They came from similar fundamentalist-religious backgrounds. But he became disenchanted with Paisley’s extreme religious politics to the point where he saw him as ‘the most dangerous man in Northern Ireland’. Drawing on his personal relationship with Paisley, Brown presents a compelling picture of a man who…
A stunning celebration of the rich culture and fascinating history of Ireland featuring ten Irish illustrators. Discover everything that makes the Irish isle so special – from its famous landmarks to its myths and legends, from its epic battles to its incredible music … and everything in between. With a foreword from much-loved Irish comedian…
In this book the award-winning Belfast journalist and author reflects on a long career of reporting on the main events in Northern Ireland over the past sixty years and on the aftermath of conflicts in the developing world including Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Vietnam and Rwanda. He covered the worst of the Troubles from the beginning…
Denis Bradley was born and raised in Buncrana, just 12 miles from the border with Northern Ireland. On joining the priesthood he found himself assigned to the cathedral parish in Derry city, arriving in the summer of 1970 as the streets were descending into chaos with the outbreak of the Troubles. An eyewitness to the…
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…