Books like Ireland

Set in 1975, Louise Kennedy’s novel deals with some themes particular to Northern Ireland and its sectarian characteristics, such as the challenges of navigating conversational and attitudinal hurdles when engaging with someone from the ‘other’ community and the travails of undertaking ‘everyday’ tasks against the invasive background of the security situation. 

However, I liked that the work also dealt with wider issues, such as differences in expectations and behavior in rural and urban settings and the impact that class and education may have on social interactions. I enjoyed the novel both as a love story between the young Catholic barmaid and the older married Protestant lawyer (who doesn’t like a love story?) but also as an observational analysis of the conditions in Northern Ireland at the time and their sad outworkings on the lives of people only peripherally involved in the politics of that society.   

One of the things I find fascinating about Northern Ireland is how ‘ordinary’ life continued to function in quite extraordinary circumstances. The travel writer, Dervla Murphy, who was from the south of Ireland, journeyed around Northern Ireland in 1976-1977, and this book is the record of that trip.

I like the complexity of opinions and attitudes she encounters and her own honesty about the impact these had on her thoughts on the conflict, the region, and its people. She embarked on the book as ‘shame out of repentance’ at her judgemental reaction to hearing ‘two of the more bone-headed Northern politicians arguing on the wireless.’

I found her accounts of meeting people on both sides of ‘the divide’ and their attitudes to each other, and to her, a thought-provoking reflection on the politics, society, and challenges of Northern Ireland in this dark period of the conflict. 

The emergence of the violent phase of the conflict in Northern Ireland (euphemistically known as ‘The Troubles’) in the late 1960s has been subject to much debate over the years. But there is a danger that, given what happened once the violence erupted, its origins and their complexity have been obscured. 

Many now see the conflict as simply about which jurisdiction should have sovereignty over the region. I like that Bob Purdie’s book on the civil rights movement (CRM) brought nuance and complexity back into the debate. The tendency of some books to either downplay the CRM or portray it as just another facet of the constitutional/jurisdictional question is avoided (and indeed refuted) in this book.

Purdie encourages us to question the structures and politics of Northern Ireland before the violence started and to examine the relationship between the CRM and the violence that followed it. The book made me… show more.

Michael Magee’s novel is a cracking exploration of life in contemporary Belfast. The examination of a young man’s quest to find some direction and economic stability whilst working in precarious employment had me hooked from the outset. His attempts to deal with the fall-out from a casual act of violence and his romantic/friendship dilemmas seemed to sum up well the struggles many faced in their early 20s, between university and their ‘future’ (alas, a distant memory for me now). 

So far, so rite of passage-y. But what I think makes the book an informative read on Northern Ireland and its conflict is the fact that the impact of that violent period is an ever-present but infrequently acknowledged factor in a book set 30 years after the violence (largely) ended. When it does appear in the novel, it is often unheralded, disruptive, and fleeting. This made me reflect on the extent… show more.

For the longest time, I have wanted to better comprehend the winding and complex years-long road to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the multi-party accord, which, with the US government serving as an international peace broker, ended decades of sectarian and state violence at the end of Paul O’Dwyer’s life.

This lucid and objective scholarly account helped me grasp how O’Dwyer and a cadre of fellow grassroots organizers managed in 1992 to elicit a public vow from Bill Clinton to appoint a US envoy to Northern Ireland, with Clinton making good on the promise during his presidency. 

The late nineteenth century is key to understanding the modern relationship between Britain and Ireland and no book does a better job of defining and exploring that relationship than this one.

The author deftly transitions between Charles Stewart Parnell, the Land War, and the Home Rule movement in Ireland on the one hand and Prime Minister William Gladstone, Queen Victoria, and British parliamentary politics on the other. The central focus, though, is on a murderous conspiracy that had long-range implications for both Britain and Ireland and includes a detective story to solve the murders that could have come straight out of the pages of Arthur Conan Doyle.

The book also includes the story of the informer whose attempts to escape retribution constitute an adventure story in its own right. 

This is a gem. It is the story of a discreet legal mechanism by which Britain hoped to check the Irish desire for independence even after the foundation of the Irish state.

Mohr’s close reliance on verifiable sources stands in marked contrast to what has been seen since its publication in 1935 as the standard authority on Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations (Peace by Ordeal by Frank Pakenham, later Britain’s Lord Longford, a work that I have come to see as deeply unsatisfactory if not deliberately propagandist).

Louis’s excellent, and now classic work, should play a far larger role in discussions of the meanings of imperialism and anti-imperialism than has been the case in recent years. Drawing on a deep grasp of British foreign policy and domestic politics, Louis examines what he calls the “grand strategy of non-intervention and conciliation” that leaned heavily towards the existing Arab regimes. Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and especially Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and other leading officials in the British Foreign Office and Colonial Office, believed that a Jewish state in Palestine would antagonize the Arabs and lead to a decline in British influence in the Middle East. Louis draws attention to Richard Crossman and other British critics of the policy of preserving Britain’s imperial role in Palestine. It is one of those indispensable works of scholarship regarding these events.

Like Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August to which this compares in the breadth of scope and depth of knowledge, this is a huge, rich feast of a book and one of the best you can read on World War I as well as on the formative geopolitics of the modern Middle East. Like the greatest of the imperial geographers, David’s scholarship was omnivorous but his original discipline was law: his discussion of the rashly-drawn boundaries that are at the heart of A Peace to End All Peace is without peer.

Full disclosure: David was also a friend who, like his book, was incredibly generous. I owe my book to a particularly compendious footnote in A Peace to End All Peace. It caught my eye and I became obsessed with why I didn’t know more about such an enormous presence, eventually traveling to Britain, France, Israel, and the Isle… show more.

As The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, Muggeridge exposed Stalin’s man-made famine in 1933; in the 1940s, he became one of Orwell’s closest friends. In between the two, he conducted this caustic post mortem on a catastrophic decade. Some of it still feels timely, like his observation that a cultural obsession with information perversely incentivises the manipulation and fabrication of data. All of it is deliciously quotable: he compares the human rights activists who whitewashed Stalinism to “vegetarians undertaking a pious pilgrimage to a slaughterhouse because it displayed a notice recommending nut-cutlets.”