Product Description

A history of Ireland from 1600 to 1972; an account not only of the events themselves but also the way in which those events acted upon the peoples living in Ireland to produce an 'Irish Nation'; a description of that nation's tragedy and resilience.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8855 in Books
• Published on: 1990-03-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 704 pages

About the Author
R. F. Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. His books include The Irish Story and W. B. Yeats: A Life.

Customer Reviews

Masterly and comprehensive, if occasionally a bit of a slog
Interested to learn more about a country I have visited many times and may well be seeing a lot more of in the near future, I picked this off the shelf as the best of the options available to me.

It's extremely well written and comprehensively covers the whole of modern Irish history in a balanced and authoritative way.

If I have one criticism, it is sometimes somewhat heavy going; if I can add another, in some places it assumes knowledge which the reader may not have. Although I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about modern history, it's precisely becaase I don't know about the history of Ireland that I bought and read the book, and a little more explanation in some places would have been welcome.

But that said, (and unless anyone knows better) I would certainly recommend this to anyone with a serious desire to learn more about Irish history from someone who, unusually it seems, is keen to explain it without pushing an agenda at the same time.