Author:R F Foster
R.F. Foster's The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it Up in Ireland examines how key events in Irish history have been recast and retold to serve a multiplicity of purposes.
In this provocative and extremely funny book Roy Foster demolishes the clichés that surround Ireland's past, examining how key moments have been turned into myths - and, more recently, airbrushed and repackaged for Hollywood and popular culture.
Whether discussing the 'misery tourism' of Famine theme parks, ideas of mystical Celticism, the contested 'Irishness' of Yeats or the sentimentalized childhoods of Angela's Ashes and Gerry Adams's memoir, The Irish Story brilliantly separates the tall tales from the truth.
'Brilliantly scathing ... combative, incisive and immensely enjoyable'
Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times
'Inspirational ... challenging, illuminating and witty'
Antonia Fraser, Irish Times Books of the Year
'Very funny ... the Irish story has rarely received so lively and unbiased an unfolding'
Patricia Craig, Independent
'A complex and supremely intelligent revision of Irish identity'
Colm Tóibín, Independent Books of the Year
'Blazingly good ... lucid and elegant'
John Lloyd, Financial Times
R. F. Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. His books include Modern Ireland: 1600-1972, Luck and the Irish and W. B. Yeats: A Life.
One of the year's best biographies... A compelling portrait of one of history's greatest figures
—— Catherine Lockerbie , ScotsmanMcLynn writes with considerable verve: his pithy characterisations of Napoleon's subordinates, the alternating chapters of narrative and analysis, the dramatic set-pieces...all these combine to make his biography pleasurable and highly instructive to read
—— Brendan Simms , Evening StandardMcLynn offers an admirably clear narrative, neither adulatory nor debunking. He acknowledges and displays the extraordinary tale and does not hide the pettiness
—— Alan Massie , Daily TelegraphA robust, well-paced biography which pans confidently from the seventeen-year-old child educated by Jesuits to the ruins of the imperial grandeur and death by slow arsenic poisoning on a bleak St Helena
—— Colin Cardwell , Scotland on SundayEasily the best of the year's diaries... It proves to be an astonishingly moving and human document
—— Anthony Howard, Sunday TimesThe best political diarist of our times
—— Malcolm Rutherford, Financial TimesReading A. N. Wilson's The Victorians provides ongoing pleasure in handsomely researched, beautifully written prose about an age which we have come to think disparagingly. We thought wrong
—— Clement Freud , Mail on SundayThe Victorians was one of the books that gave me greatest pleasure during the past year... A brilliant evocation of an age
—— Ian McIntyre , The TimesRarely have author and subject been found in such deep and contented harmony... Wilson's tour de force
—— Robert McCrum , ObserverWilson's panoramic survey is the best attempt so far to describe and explain what was happening in that fascinating time
—— Literary ReviewThe Victorians finds Wilson writing at the height of his powers
—— The IndependentI can't recall a history book furnishing so many laughs en route ... The Victorians is a work of scholarship, a labour of love, a persusasive polemic
—— John Sutherland , Mail on Sunday