Barrister Kieron Wood has turned what might have been a footnote of history into a highly readable account of the long-running affair between the Allied commander General Dwight D Eisenhower and his West Cork-born chauffeuse Kay Summersby (née MacCarthy-Morrogh). It may seem frivolous and dis
Reviews
Striking Out, Ireland's first home-grown legal TV drama in years, premiered on RTÉ One on Sunday 1 January 2017 - so you'd be forgiven for missing it amid the New Year festivities.
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic’s book reads with such ease that you tend to forget that you’re reading an extensively researched chronicle of the cases that have shaped Ireland. Each chapter serves to educate and entertain the reader with insightful accounts of the social and political influences surround
Declan Martin’s Irish Politics in Postcards is both a fantastic read, and an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Irish history. The (mostly) unbiased commentary throughout each chapter of Irish political history unravels the intricacies of each illustration in a manner that is accessible,
“I was five years old when I learned that my grandmother lived behind a curtain.” The line that opens this book written by a former U.S. intelligence officer, Nina Willner is, of course, a reference to the Iron Curtain. Forty Autumns spans three generations of the author’s family living in Eas
Kapil Summan was greatly impressed by East West Street and spoke to the author about current threats to human rights. In The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, scientist Jared Diamond cites 20 genocides since 1950, arguing that “genocide has been part of our human and prehuman heritage for mil
Churchill and Ireland Churchill’s close links to Ireland and his involvement in Irish politics have been somewhat underplayed in most biographies, a state of affairs that is remedied in Paul Bew’s concise but thorough book.
Our ideas of Paris during the war may well have been shaped from the film Casablanca. "Well, Rick, we’ll always have Paris…" Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) says. But I would doubt few, if any of us, would have paused to consider what Paris actually meant for those living there in the period of the Second
Scottish advocate Stephen O'Rourke is impressed with a new biography of the great barrister Marshall Hall. This life of ‘The Great Defender’ and Conservative MP Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC (1858-1927) is a fascinating read, beautifully written by another English silk, Sally Smith QC.
Justice (terminally) delayed... In her excellent book Indian Summer, Alex von Tunzelmann recounts that Horace Alexander, a friend of Mahatma Gandhi’s, once wrote “I sometimes think our greatest crime against India was to turn all her best sons into lawyers.”
Scottish lawyer Brian Inkster of Inksters Solicitors enjoys a fascinating account of the Highland Clearances but is angered at the parallels with the conduct of the Crofting Commission of today. In Set Adrift Upon the World: The Sutherland Clearances James Hunter masterly weaves together a fascinati
Professor Hector MacQueen of the University of Edinburgh writes for our sister publication, Scottish Legal News, about a new biography of the influential philosopher David Hume which he finds absorbing and worthy of the great man. Long ago I was introduced to the philosophy of David Hume (1711-76) b
The gavel, a device never used in the English courts, features on the cover of Confessions of a Barrister – and is a harbinger of things to come. The book is an anonymised account of the trials and travails of criminal barrister, “Russell Winnock”, who called in 1999. But, the title notwithsta
It may surprise some readers that the last Communard of this title is not Jimmy Somerville, the shrill voice of the 1980s, but Adrien Lejeune who as a young free-thinker reluctantly took the side of the Commune revolutionaries when the people of Paris rose up against the reactionary French governmen
What Paintings Say is a wonderful study of 100 masterpieces, lavishly illustrated and packed with history presented in an accessible and readable way.