Read Ireland Book Review
Issue 137
Biographies, Autobiographies and Memoirs
Oliver St. John Gogarty: A Poet and His Times by Ulick O'Connor (Paperback; 12.99 IEP / 17.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Oliver St. John Gogarty was called by Yeats 'one of the greatest lyric poets of the age'. Asquith thought Gogarty the wittiest man in London. As Wilde had conquered London society with his brilliant wit, so too did Gogarty who was taught the art of conversation by Wilde's tutor, Professor Mahaffy. Gogarty was also a surgeon, a senator, a playwright, a champion athlete and swimmer and author of a number of renowned books. He was also the irreverent and flamboyant drinking companion of James Joyce, providing the character of Buck Mulligan for Ulysses, the exuberant and mocking wit who delighted George Moore, and a friend and inspiration to the man who was high priest of the Irish literary renaissance, William Butler Yeats. From his boisterous student days, through the time of the Irish Civil War, and in all his years as a successful surgeon and unrivalled conversationalist, Gogarty embodied the life of Dublin during one of its richest and most turbulent periods. This classic biography is once again available!
Diary of a Teddy Boy: A Memoir of the Long Sixties by Mim Scala (Paperback; 9.99 IEP / 13.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
The heady ferment of Sixties culture, wherever the action was, the author of this humorous and self-deprecating book was there. Riding high on a roller-coaster of flickering fame and fortune, he entertained Diana Dors, hosts gaming parties with Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, evades the wrath of the Kray twins, hires Dennis Hopper, cajoles Jean-Luc Godard into filming the Rolling Stones, signs Cat Stevens to Island Records, and minds Marianne Faithful through her stunning Broken English comeback. When his friend Brian Jones dies in 1969, Mim also senses the death of an era. Richly anecdotal, this book conveys like few other memoirs what it was like to experience the most pivotal decade of the twentieth century.
From the Horse's Mouth by Liz Kavanagh (Paperback; 7.99 IEP / 10.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
For a quarter of a century, Liz Kavanagh has been delighting readers of the Irish Farmers' Journal with her warm, down-to-earth accounts of farming life. This book is the third volume of her collected pieces, following the enormously popular Country Living and Home to Roost. From the joys of playing tooth fairy to her granddaughter and discovering a crop of summer mushrooms, to the pain of handing over the reins of the precious farm to her sons as she and Eoin grow older - the events of the year are recounted with an honesty and warmth that will give great pleasure to readers, young and old.
Oliver Cromwell: An Illustrated History by Helen Litton (Paperback; 7.99 IEP / 10.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
Oliver Cromwell spent less that ten months in Ireland, but the impact of his offensive has never been forgotten. For centuries his infamous reputation has been iron-cast in the Irish mind. The bitter memories of slaughter at the sieges of Drogheda and Wexford, the scenes of transportation and transplantation - immortalised in the cry 'To Hell or Connaught!' - have been slow to fade. From Cromwell's rise to prominence amidst the Puritan fervour of seventeenth-century England, through the two civil wars there to the invasion, subjugation and mass settlement of Ireland, the author provides a fascinating and factual account of Cromwell's Irish campaign. She also gives a concise overview of the complex political situation in Ireland prior to the Cromwellian invasion, from the Rising of 1641 to the formation of the Confederation of Kilkenny.
Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas by David Murray (Hardback; 23.00 IEP / 28.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Famed as the most beautiful undergraduate in Oxford of his day and remembered as the lover of Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas, or Bosie as he was always known, remains one of the most notorious figures in literary history. In this fascinating and passionate biography, the author explores fully , for the first time, the mass of contradictions that made up his life. A genius yet a failure through his tormented youth, Bosie's deep and enduring friendship with Oscar Wilde continued throughout the trials and subsequent imprisonment of Wilde and on until his death in 1900. He became great friends with George Bernard Shaw and Marie Stopes and was associated with the Bloomsbury Group. His religious devotion increased as spiralling debts cut short his happiness. Soon battles with the remainder of the Wilde circle, his father-in-law, and indeed his libelling of Winston Churchill led to his own imprisonment, followed by a semi-reclusive state until his death in 1945. The author of this biography has secured the release of a Home Office file which was to be sealed until 2043 which holds the key to Bosie's state of mind while in prison and the only original workings of some of his best poetry. With the significant new material and fresh insights, the author portrays Bosie as an important poet whose tragedy extended far beyond his lover's death.
The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920 by John McCourt (Hardback; 25.00 IEP / 32.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
This book is based on extensive scrutiny of previously unused sources and informed by the author's intimate knowledge of the culture and dialect of Trieste. It is possibly the most important work of Joyce biography since Ellmann, and re-creates this fertile period in Joyce's life with an extraordinary richness of detail and depth of understanding.
In Trieste, Joyce wrote most of the stories in Dubliners, turned Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and began Ulysses. Echoes and influences of Trieste are rife throughout Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Though Trieste had become a sleepy backwater by the time Ellmann visited there in the 1950s, McCourt shows that in the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the city was a teeming imperial port, intensely cosmopolitan and polyglot. There Joyce experienced the various cultures and central Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. He knew many Jews, who collectively provided much of the material for the character of Leopold Bloom. He encountered continental socialism, Italian irredentism, Futurism and various other political and artistic movements whose subtle influences McCourt traces with literary grace and scholarly rigour. This book is a rare landmark in the crowded terrain of Joyce studies.
Maire Bhui Ni Laoire: A Poet of Her People by Brian Brennan (Paperback; 7.99 IEP / 10.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
Maire Bhui Ni Laoire was a popular nineteenth-century folk poet, born in 1774 near Inchigeelagh, County Cork, into the 'Bhui' branch of the O'Leary family that once held the local lands under the patronage of the MacCarthys. Other member of the clan include Art O'Leary, an outstanding folk hero of the Penal days, and the eighteenth-century Gaelic poet Donnchadh Dail O'Laoire, who extolled the virtues of the MacCarthys. Maire Bhui was illiterate but her poems and songs still survive in the folklore of West Cork. This is her life story and a story of the times and place in which she lived.
The Rebel Countess: The Life and Times of Constance Markievicz by Anne Marreco (Paperback; 17.70 IEP / 22.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Constance Markievicz - rebel countess to the Anglo-Irish Establishment, 'Madame' to the Dublin poor who loved her - was one of the most vivid in the constellation of remarkable men and women who created Ireland's political and literary renaissance in the early years of the twentieth century. Beautiful, admirable, aggravating Constance is chiefly known for her part in the Easter Rising of 1916, but how she came to be there is as strange a story as her role in it and what happened to her afterwards. Friend of Yeats, Sean O'Casey, AE, Maud Gonne, James Connolly and others, she knew everyone significant in the Ireland of her time and was at the forefront of events from the first. The author, with full access to family papers, has written a remarkable biography of an extraordinary women.
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