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“... once in a delicate line-drawing of the 1950s, by Robert Rhodes James. But all this time, as Roy Foster’s book makes plain, another Lord Randolph has lain concealed by the conventions of portraiture. Winston, to whom his father was a divinity but also a stranger, wanted to prove that Lord Randolph possessed all the attributes of the ideal ...”

“... of Ireland seems insatiable and sales can match those of a moderately successful novel. Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland has exceeded such expectations. It has recorded sales in excess of 12,000 hardback copies on the Irish market alone since its publication in October 1988. Such an astonishing success is richly deserved. ...”

“... large-scale biography of Yeats, died in 1983, and after some vicissitudes the task devolved on Roy Foster, the professor of Irish history at Oxford. He has had access to Lyons’s notes and transcripts, invaluable to a successor confronted, as he says, with ‘a vast and unfamiliar subject’. Vast it remains, but the unfamiliarity has clearly ...”

“... an interview with Karl Miller). There is an interesting account of the reception of North in R.F. Foster’s new study, a compact but comprehensive guide to Heaney. Foster is well attuned to the shifting contexts, as one would expect of a leading historian of modern Ireland, but he is also an extremely astute reader, and ...”

“... least in the minds of its signatories, for five days before the rebellion was crushed. Yet as Roy Foster implies, the founding of a republic was not as clear-cut a goal for the precursors of the men of 1916, or even for the men, and women, of the War of Independence that broke out in 1919, as later nationalist piety would insist. It is startling to read, in ...”

“... this practice: the Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford, for example, calls himself R.F. Foster when in full academic dress and Roy when in more shirt-sleeved mode. But it may be a sign of Taylor’s intense attachment to early 20th-century English writing, a period on which it is hard to outmatch his knowledge, that he should opt for this way of ...”

“... in our glorious past, and it was essential for our past to be glorious if our present, in what Roy Foster in his new book of essays calls ‘the disillusioned tranquillity of the Free State’, was to have any meaning. This was what our ancestors fought for; we had it now; it had to be good. At the launch of his book Thomas Pakenham sat on a podium at the top ...”

“... studies of economy, politics and culture by social historians as intelligent as John McEwen, John Foster and Ian Carter, writers as good as John McGrath and Tom Nairn, politicians as energetic as Robin Cook and Jim Sillars. To write for it felt like good militant fun (I contributed the piece on ‘The Radical Literary Tradition’) – a fling at the ...”