20th-century / Contemporary History

Donegal: History and Society, William Nolan, Liam Ronayne and Máiread Dunlevy (eds.). (Geography Publications, £40) ISBN: 0906602459

The editors have set out to place County Donegal in its local, national and European contexts by combining the work of archaeologists, medievalists, Celtic scholars, geographers, place name scholars and historians of economics, culture and politics. The result is the most comprehensive interdisciplinary study ever undertaken of Donegal. The geographical entity we know today as … Read more

Europe: A History, Norman Davies, (Oxford University Press, £25). ISBN: 0198201710

Eight years after the fall of the Berlin Wall seems an appropriate time for the arrival of new European histories which attempt to give East and West parity of esteem. Such histories are now wending their way to the bookstores. Europe: a History has garnered the most headlines (and sales). The layout is innovative. The … Read more

1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy, Tom Garvin, (Gill and Macmillan, £14.99). ISBN: 0717124398

In a series of fascinating and brilliantly argued interconnecting essays Professor Tom Garvin has addressed the emergence of a democratic Irish state through the pivotal period of what he terms the long 1922: from the truce of July 1921 to the dumping of arms in May 1923 which marked the end of the Civil War. … Read more

W.B.Yeats: A Life, Volume I: The Apprentice Mage 1864 -1914, R.F. Foster, (Oxford University Press, £25). ISBN: 0192117351

If Yeats had many talents, then one was certainly his foresight, or as Roy Foster describes it, ‘that faculty, which always amazed his wife, of knowing how things would look to people afterwards’. But frequently this went further than prophecy: when it came to the question of how he himself might look in retrospect, Yeats … Read more