History Ireland

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Crossword July/August 2010

Listening to grasshoppers: field notes on democracy

These essays initially appeared as ‘urgent public interventions at critical moments’ between 2001 and 2008. Collected together at the conclusion of India’s blockbuster 2009 general election, they present ‘a detailed […]

From a Clear Blue Sky : surviving the Mountbatten bomb

From a clear blue sky takes the form of a three-part drama: before the bomb, after the bomb and learning to live with the bomb. But it opens with the […]

Full tilt: Ireland to India with a bicycle

The best travel books always have a back story: the line that goes back through time, tethering the writer to the reason why they wanted to write this particular book, […]

Bookworm

Over the years some rigorous, if isolated, comparative studies on Ireland and India have been published. S.B. Cook’s Imperial affinities and Margaret Kelleher’s The feminisation of famine stand out. The […]

That field of glory. The story of Clontarf, from battleground to garden suburb
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Darkest Dublin: The story of the Church Street disaster and a pictorial account of the slums of Dublin in 1913
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On this Day

January 18

1919 The Paris Peace Conference, better known as the Versailles Peace Conference, at which the victorious Allied Powers set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers, began.
1979 Leo Varadkar, TD for Dublin West since 2007 and taoiseach since June 2017, born in Dublin.
1987 T. Desmond Wilson, professor of modern history at UCD (1949–85) and editor of The Great Famine (1956) with Robert Dudley Edwards, died.
1937 John Hume, founding member of the SDLP, member of the British and European parliaments, co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (1998) and one of the architects of the Northern Ireland Peace Process, born in Derry.
1936 Rudyard Kipling (70), short-story writer, poet and novelist, who also wrote an acclaimed two-volume history of the Irish Guards (1923), died. His only son, John (18), was killed whilst serving with the Guards at the Battle of Loos in September 1915.
1934 Joe Devlin, the leading northern nationalist politician both before and after the Treaty of 1921, died. Devlin was the leading survivor of the rout of the Irish Party by Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election, in which he defeated Éamon de Valera in the Falls division of Belfast.
1811 Charles Kean, celebrated actor/manager on the London stage, born in Waterford.