Ireland

During the last decades of the eighteenth century, the Ascendancy in Ireland, writes William D. Griffin, was dominated by Lord Clare, a figure both reviled and admired.

For twenty-five years, writes Charles Curran, a former major in the U.S. Federal Army acted as a British secret agent among the Irish Nationalists.

Terence H. O'Brien describes how Alfred Milner, later the apostle of the British Empire, paid a revealing visit as a young man to Ireland, then in the throes of the Home Rule struggle.

Thomas Pakenham describes the ill-fated but remarkable efforts of a tiny French naval expedition to help conquer Ireland for the rebels during the 1798 Rising.

Donald Read describes how, during the 1830s and 1840s an Irishman, claiming royal descent, became the hero of British working men in the Chartist campaign for universal suffrage and equal Parliamentary representation.

Having failed to introduce a new Irish coinage, writes John S. Powell, this ambitious projector set out to revolutionize contemporary iron-production.

Disastrous battle raged on the Somme from July until November, 1916; John Terraine describes how it marked the ‘ruddy grave’ of the German field army.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writes Marjorie Sykes, the arrival of migrant labourers, who often visited the same district year after year, was a distinctive feature of English country-life.

Tracked down to a ‘hut in the cavern of a rock’, writes J.J.N. McGurk, Desmond met his death at the hands of fellow Irishmen.

In 1579 James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, cousin to the 14th Earl of Desmond, took up arms against the English foe.