Ireland

Broken Archangel: The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement by Roland Philipps unearths the complexities and contradictions of the Irish rebel.

Remembered today as a national hero, Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, had an upbringing which spanned Essex to Ulster. He was a hybrid king to the last.

Ireland’s experience of partition informed the attitudes of people across the island towards British plans for Palestine. Today it informs sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Following his accession, the majority of James I’s new English subjects accepted their Scottish king with ‘comforte and contentmente’. Such sentiments would not last.

Hollywood’s Cold War dissidents in Ireland.

The anti-Russian poetry of Frances Browne, the ‘Blind Poetess of Ulster’.

In December 1922 a proclamation signed by George V formally established the Irish Free State. Among loyalists in three border counties of Ulster, partitioned and cut adrift from unionist jurisdiction, the sense of betrayal was acute.

During the worst year of the Troubles, the British government became alarmed at the implications of a Soviet embassy opening in Dublin.

When the abolitionist author visited Britain and Ireland in 1845 he was celebrated in poems and songs wherever he went. Arriving as an enslaved man, he left with his freedom.