Search Results

“... the American diplomat’ suggested by Lafayette for preliminary reconaissance, was also Edward ‘Edwards’ the English spy, which may have had something to do with the failure to hit the target). But the real difficulty about the book lies in the meaning of the word ‘Ireland’. And it was also the real difficulty about the period. ‘Ireland’ meant one ...”

“... With the inevitable exceptions of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Marx, it is doubtful whether any political thinker has inspired more sustained imbecility among his friends and enemies than Edmund Burke. And, despite first appearances, his appeal is far less predictable than theirs. Both Aquinas and Marx were in the first place theoreticians: the latter died at his desk, the former should have done ...”

“... Kipling leapt into British fame at the beginning of 1890, and it had been Ireland which had given him his chance – that and the rich harvest of short stories from his Indian years. He hit England just before the Commission on ‘Parnellism and Crime’ was about to report. That report, predictably, exonerated Parnell and his party, accused by the Times of having fomented the Phoenix Park murders of Chief Secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and Under-Secretary Thomas Burke, who had in reality been killed (on 6 May 1882) by Parnell’s bitter enemies the Invincibles ...”

“... no other form of academic history achieves as wide a readership as biography. Oliver MacDonagh and Owen DudleyEdwards offer new interpretations of two men, each of whom dominated the politics of his time, Daniel O’Connell and Eamon de Valera. Their relevance to the current crisis is most apparent in the way each had ...”

“... received a verdict of not proven: she had been ably defended by Henry Cockburn. A bad business; Owen DudleyEdwards calls it mass murder. Blackwood’s Magazine made it even worse than it was, adding atrocity to atrocity, in one of their series of imaginary conversations, the Noctes Ambrosianae. John Wilson ...”

“... Gibbon did not foresee Napoleon), was secured and stabilised by its competing state systems. Owen DudleyEdwards’s book is self-confessedly idiosyncratic and far stronger on Macaulay’s life than on his intellect. He argues that it was the great man’s Celtic background, ‘his bardic self’, which shaped his ...”

“... he could ‘hardly read’. As for Moriartys ... But to continue this catalogue would be unjust to Owen DudleyEdwards’s book. Convinced (as he several times asserts) that Conan Doyle is a great writer, Mr Edwards has gone to work on an appropriate scale. The result is a full and in ...”

“... by a discussion of the ideas of scholars like Ransom (greatly influenced by the earlier work of Owen DudleyEdwards) who see Connolly’s socialism as evolving out of his Catholicism. Similarly, the arguments of John Newsinger deserve notice: he, like Morgan, believes that Connolly was not in any meaningful sense a ...”

“... with England. Painstaking work since the 1950s by a broad range of scholars such as R.B. McDowell, Owen DudleyEdwards, F.S.L. Lyons and Patrick O’Farrell has profoundly altered our understanding: not only have ancient myths been invalidated, but the structure of a genuinely Irish history now exists, free from the ...”

“... Scottish nationhood never quite dies but hibernates, latent in all those millions of people and thousands of texts, ready to be potentiated by various events, some more accountable or predictable than others: the Union of the Parliaments (1707), the Scottish Renaissance embodied in MacDiarmid and Grassic Gibbon (1922-35), the flow of oil and gas from the bed of the North Sea (1977 ...”