The great Irish-English playwright--his politics, his impassioned life. A tale of stunning literary success, political celebrity and intrigue, early death, murder, treason, and revolution, this extraordinary book takes as its subject one of the most exciting and enigmatic figures in Irish and English history. Dramatist, politician, entrepreneur, philanderer, duelist, and revolutionary (or traitor), Richard Brinsley Sheridan was a man of many contradictions: a Protestant gentleman who cared about the rights of the Irish Catholic peasantry; a creative writer who was best known as a politician; a believer in sincerity yet a role-playing chameleon; a radical who masterminded the crisis following the madness of King George; a member of Parliament who associated with insurrectionists against the Crown. His unusual and still-relevant life has been captured superbly by the masterful young scholar Fintan O'Toole, in an innovative work that opens up a radical new perspective on a great writer. O'Toole shows that Sheridan must be understood as an Irish writer and dissident, a complicated man who walked a thin line between success in London and extreme danger as a supporter of democratic reform and Irish independence.

A Traitor's Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1751-1816

Biographies & Memoirs

O'TOOLE, Fintan

Arts & Literature

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

A provocative new biography of the man who forged America's alliance with the Iroquois William Johnson was scarcely more than a boy when he left Ireland and his Gaelic, Catholic family to become a Protestant in the service of Britain's North American empire. In New York by 1738, Johnson moved to the frontiers along the Mohawk River, where he established himself as a fur trader and eventually became a landowner with vast estates; served as principal British intermediary with the Iroquois Confederacy; command British, colonial, and Iroquois forces that defeated the French in the battle of Lake George in 1755; and created the first groups of "rangers," who fought like Indians and led the way to the Patriots' victories in the Revolution. As Fintan O'Toole's superbly researched, colorfully dramatic narrative makes clear, the key to Johnson's signal effectiveness was the style in which he lived as a "white savage." Johnson had two wives, one European, one Mohawk; became fluent in Mohawk; and pioneered the use of Indians as active partners in the making of a new America. O'Toole's masterful use of the extraordinary (often hilariously misspelled) documents written by Irish, Dutch, German, French, and Native American participants in Johnson's drama enlivens the account of this heroic figure's legendary career; it also suggests why Johnson's early multiculturalism unraveled, and why the contradictions of his enterprise created a historical dead end.

White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America

Historical

Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger by O'Toole, Fintan - 2010 Paperback

Ship of Fools

Faber and Faber Ltd.

Enough Is Enough. V. 2: How to Build a New Republic

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Faber and Faber

The Republic of Ireland, which declared itself in 1949, allowed the Catholic Church to dominate its civil society and education system. Investment by American and European companies, and a welcoming tax regime, created the 'Celtic Tiger' of the 1990s. That brief burst of good fortune was destroyed by a corrupt political class which encouraged a wild property boom, leaving the country almost bankrupt. What Ireland needs now is a programme of real change. It needs to become a fully modern republic in fact as well as name. Politicians have been let get away with murder, and there is a fatalistic sense that nothing can change. The country needs to encourage participation in, and oversight and knowledge of politics, to make people feel that they have a right to challenge the old party machines and to make a difference. It is their country, after all.

Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic

Business & Money

Economics

Faber&Faber

In this important book, historians, lawyers, economists and writers come together to put a coherent case: that although the Irish economic collapse has resulted in national humiliation, renewed emigration and a decline in living standards for the majority of the population, there is still hope that the country can be reformed and renewed. Irish politicians offered the now notorious blanket guarantee to all the banks which had got in over their heads during the great property bubble - including one that had become little more than a criminal enterprise. A different set of politicians grimly enforces the consequences of that guarantee, locking an entire generation of Irish men and women into paying for the mistakes of greedy bankers and their corrupt friends in government. The energy of hope has to come from elsewhere. These essays demonstrate how simple measures and different economic and social policies could release that energy and fulfil the promise of an educated, literate and culturally vibrant people.

Up the Republic!: Towards a New Ireland

Fintan O'Toole draws together the key events of modern Irish history, showing how international factors shaped them and recalling the manner in which they were reflected in The Irish Times. The book reproduces over 100 original articles from the paper, ranging from the end of the Boer War to the conflict in Kosovo. There is also a time line highlighting principal Irish and world events. Over 300 photographs, illustrations and cartoons, many rare or previously unpublished, visualise key moments of the last 100 years. They highlight the growing importance of visual media throughout the century, depicting people and events from the worlds of politics and war, art, culture and social history.

Irish Times Book of the Century, 1900-1999

History

Newleaf

This heavily illustrated book focuses on the events of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, rather than the background and the consequences. In a widely expanded version of the supplement that appeared in The Irish Times in March to commemorate the 90th Anniversary, The 1916 Rising recreates the actual course of events during that tumultuous week, based on contemporary witnesses, memoirs and later recollections. It adds up to the most comprehensive and accessible account of Easter Week in print.

The Irish Times Book of the 1916 Rising

Hegarty, Shane

Europe

Gill Books

We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

Winner • 2021 An Post Irish Book Award ― Nonfiction Book of the Year • from the judges: “The most remarkable Irish nonfiction book I’ve read in the last 10 years”; “[A] book for the ages.”\n“We Don’t Know Ourselves is a feast: a deeply absorbing chronicle of the 'known and unknowable,' and of the profound transformation of a place.” 
―Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times best-selling author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland\nA celebrated Irish writer’s magisterial, brilliantly insightful chronicle of the wrenching transformations that dragged his homeland into the modern world. 
Fintan O’Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government―in despair, because all the young people were leaving―opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don’t Know Ourselves, O’Toole, one of the Anglophone world’s most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary “backwater” to an almost totally open society―perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history. 
Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O’Toole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school, much as his forebears did. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Ireland’s main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin’s streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O’Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In O’Toole’s telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy’s 1963 visit, when the soon-to-be martyred American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis. 
A remarkably compassionate yet exacting observer, O’Toole in coruscating prose captures the peculiar Irish habit of “deliberate unknowing,” which allowed myths of national greatness to persist even as the foundations were crumbling. Forty years in the making, We Don’t Know Ourselves is a landmark work, a memoir and a national history that ultimately reveals how the two modes are entwined for all of us. 16 pages of illustrations

Liveright

Brings a strikingly original perspective to Johnson’s life, and suggests new ways of thinking about Johnson’s part in creating a nation he did not live to see. William Johnson was scarcely more than a boy when he left Ireland and his Gaelic, Roman Catholic family to become a Protestant in the service of Britain’s North American empire. In New York by 1738, Johnson moved to the frontiers along the Mohawk River, where he established himself as a fur trader and eventually became a landowner with vast estates. Serving as principal British intermediary with the Iroquois Confederacy, he commanded British, colonial, and Iroquois forces that defeated the French in the battle of Lake George in 1755, and he created the first groups of “rangers,” who fought like American Indians and led the way to the Patriots’ victories in the Revolution. As Fintan O’Toole’s superbly researched, colorfully dramatic narrative makes clear, the key to Johnson’s signal effectiveness was the style in which he lived as a “white savage.” Johnson had two wives, one European, one Mohawk; became fluent in Mohawk; and pioneered the use of American Indians as active partners in the making of a new America. O’Toole’s masterful use of the extraordinary documents written by Irish, Dutch, German, French, and American Indian participants in Johnson’s drama enlivens the account of this heroic figure’s legendary career. It also suggests why Johnson’s early multiculturalism unraveled, and why the contradictions of his enterprise created a historical dead end.

White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America (Excelsior Editions)

Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press

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