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Friends in high places: Ulster’s resistance to Irish Home Rule, 1912–14

Alan F. Parkinson (Ulster Historical Foundation, £7.99) ISBN 9781908448521 In the early 2000s I worked in the office of the leader of the Liberal Democrats (then Charles Kennedy) as a […]

Irish Gothic Architecture: construction, decay and reinvention edited by Roger Stalley

ISBN: 978-905569-70-0 Published by Wordwell in December 2012 226pp + illustrations Price €35 Irish Gothic Architecture: construction, decay and reinvention edited by Roger Stalley The volume aims to reshape the […]

The Big Book

Edmund Spenser: a life Andrew Hadfield (Oxford University Press, £25) ISBN 9780199591022 Londoner Edmund Spenser (1552–99) was already writing poetry by the time he went up to Cambridge as a […]

Bookworm

This year sees the 50th anniversary of JFK’s semi-legendary visit to Ireland (a subject we’ll be tackling in our Hedge School in the National Library on 22 October), but there […]

Museum Eye

I first wrote about the Newry museum for this column in 2005. There have been many changes since then. As some readers may know, my first job was as the […]

April 18

1952 Edmund O’Brien (71), County Limerick-born author and yachtsman who in 1923 circumnavigated the globe in his ketch Saoirse, died.
1870 Robert Noonan, house-painter, sign-writer and author, notably of The ragged-trousered philanthropists (1914), born Robert Croker, the illegitimate son of an RIC officer, at 37 Wexford Street, Dublin.
1949 Under the terms of the Republic of Ireland Act (December 1948), designed by John A. Costello’s coalition government to ‘take the gun out of Irish politics’, Ireland formally left the Commonwealth and became a republic.
1918 The Mansion House conference, called by the lord mayor of Dublin, Laurence O’Neill, on the day the Military Service Bill became law, was attended by all shades of nationalist opinion. An anti-conscription pledge, drafted by Éamon de Valera, was issued.
1870 Robert Tressell, nom de plume of Robert Croker, latterly Robert Noonan, author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (first unabridged edition published in 1955), was born in Dublin, the illegitimate son of RIC inspector and later magistrate Sir Samuel Croker.
2019 The journalist Lyra McKee (29) was shot dead by a New IRA gunman who opened fire on PSNI officers monitoring disturbances in Derry’s Creggan area. President Michael D. Higgins and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar attended her funeral.

Friends in high places: Ulster’s resistance to Irish Home Rule, 1912–14

Irish Gothic Architecture: construction, decay and reinvention edited by Roger Stalley

The Big Book

Bookworm

Museum Eye

Personal Histories

On this Day

April 18