REFERENCE: Dictionary of Irish Biography James McGuire and James Quinn, editors Royal Irish Academy/Cambridge University Press…

POLITICS: Judging Lemass: The measure of the man By Tom Garvin Royal Irish Academy, 300pp. €30

MICHAEL KENNEDY reviews My Father, The Genral by Ristéard Mulcahy, Liberties Oress, 283pp €17.99

History: 'No Surrender Here!' - The Civil War Papers of Ernie O'Malley, 1922-1924 Edited by Cormac KH O'Malley and Anne Dolan…

History: This is a beautifully produced book. The Royal Irish Academy has certainly delivered for Dr Ferriter

History: The words of Lord Acton in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge have an especially…

History Why do we find it so disconcerting to learn that a mass murderer such as Stalin loved gardening, music, literature, …

Irish Times writers review the latest paperbacks

Irish History: As Peter Hart observes, Michael Collins has had a remarkably easy ride from historians and biographers who have…

Biography: It has been a long time since anyone thought of Eoin O'Duffy as a hero

Biography The enduring power of James Connolly's reputation is a phenomenon in itself

Biography/Stalin: A Biography By Robert: On my sideboard, I have mounted a permanent exhibition of political kitsch which includes…

Biography In the early 1970s, when I was a student, I found myself on a summer evening in the centre of Dublin with nothing …

History: I despise reviewers who talk about themselves rather than their subject, but - while I will eventually get around to…

W.B. Yeats has been the subject of much scholarly attention in recent times.

I clearly remember the first time I read Tom Barry's IRA memoir, Guerilla Days in Ireland

Biography/Declan Kiberd: 'It is easy to pelt a man who can't reply or who is gone," wrote Roger Casement during his last days…

History: In September, 1911, Dr Herbert Spencer Dickey of New York introduced himself to Roger Casement in a hotel bar in Bridgetown…

Biography: Among the varied and extraordinary cast that participated in the drama that was the Irish independence movement of…

Irish History: 'Genteel Revolutionaries" hardly trips off the tongue

George Russell (1867-1935) was born in Lurgan, the third child of a Methodist bookkeeper in a cambric manufacturers, and died…

According to Lennox Robinson, Lady Gregory 'was - is - the Abbey'

The Republicans lost the Civil War, but they won the battle of words which followed it

For Mc Cormack, the life and work of Synge is a narrative which involves, in all its local particularities, the crisis of the…

This well-illustrated biography is rather weak on the historical background

Scots-Irish to the core, Sam Hanna Bell was born in Glasgow in 1909, but came to live near the shores of Strangford Lough at …

Ernie O'Malley was a daring guerilla leader and - as the title of this fine biography asserts - an intellectual

Ernie O'Malley was born in 1887, the second of 11 children

IRISH history and politics, whatever meaning they may hold for the peoples of this island and the neighbouring one, are obscure…

MEDA RYAN's Michael Collins and Women in His Life (Mercier, £8

LIKE the souls in his play, Purgatory, it has been Yeats's fate to relive his transgressions, and that not once but many times…

BORN in London, Erskine Childers spent part of his childhood in Glendalough, went to school in England, and worked as a Committee…

WHEN I was teaching in Clontarf in the late 1950s I had and O Malley boy in class