Ulick O'Connor takes the reader into the heart of Irish life during the 1970s and 1980s, evoking the streets and bars of Dublin with their now legendary characters: the world of Abbey Theatre and that of the Gate Theatre of Michale MacLiammoir. He recreates the atmosphere and talk of the great Anglo-Irish country houses such as Lexlip Castle and Tullynally, where he often stayed as a guest of the Guinesses and the Longfords. He also reveals the secret part he played as a go-between for the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch.;But O'Connor's stage isn't just Irish, it is international. In New York he makes friends with Viva, the star of Andy Warhol's infamous "Blue Movie", talks to Robert Kennedy, and witnesses the anti-Vietnam protests and the growth of the Civil Rights movement. In London he appears on Wogan, he dines with Alec Waugh and Paul Bowles in Tangiers, and in Stockholm he plays a practical joke on Edna O'Brien that unhappily misfires.

From her overprotected girlhood to her ascension to the throne at twenty-five, to her personal and national difficulties as queen, Elizabeth II has presided over her people for half a century. Acclaimed historian Erickson tells the queen's story from her point of view, letting the reader re-live Elizabeth's long and eventful life. Lilibet shows us an Elizabeth we thought we knew - but in a different light. We glimpse, as never before, the strong and appealing sovereign who has reigned over the decline of Great Britain and the fall in prestige of her own Windsor dynasty.

Charles J. Haughey, over the last five decades, has been involved in major political scandals of Watergate proportions: the Arms Crisis, the telephone tapping scandal, the Beef Tribunal, the Ben Dunne payments, tax evasion, the Terry Keane revelations, the Moriarty Tribunal investigation into payments to politicians, the McCracken Tribunal, etc.; In this revised edition of Fallen Idol, Ryle Dwyer updates the scandals and delivers his conclusions on the Haughey Years.; Lively, succinct, opinionated, drawing extensively on in-depth research, Forty Years of Controversy is the indispensable handbook for anyone intrigued by one of Ireland's most inscrutable politicians.

In July 1997, Hong Kong will ceased to be a British colony and reverted to the People's Republic of China. Five million people lost their status as British subjects and became citizens of a Special Administrative Region of the PRC. It was always clear that the last five years of British rule would be fraught with uncertainty. For this reason, the appointment of the former Chairman of the Conservative Party, Chris Patten, in June 1992 as the last governor of Hong Kong, was greeted with widespread approval. With rare and priveleged access to the governor and his team, the author provides an insight into events leading up to the handover, including reasons why relations between China and Britain were at their lowest ebb for a generation. The situation is placed in its human and historical context.

In this most improbable of twentieth-century wars, Argentina and Great Britain waged a three-month conflict over a group of islets in the South Atlantic that hold no strategic or material value for either side, that are barely habitable by any human standard, and that have fewer permanent settlers than the total number of combatants.

On the morning of 7 July 2005, Peter Zimonjic, a Canadian journalist living and working in London, was travelling on an eastbound Circle line train heading towards Edgware Road. Coming in the opposite direction was a train carrying Mohammed Sidique Khan with a bag full of explosives. As the trains passed each other in the tunnel, Sidique Khan detonated his bomb. Peter's train came to a standstill and he managed to smash the window in his carriage and crawl into the carnage where he and several others spent the next hour desperately trying to help the injured and dying. Into the Darkness reconstructs the story of the day at all four bomb sites based on intensive interviews with dozens of survivors. In the form of a dramatic narrative this book documents the bravery, the triumphs, the despairs, and the shortfalls that occurred on a day when the innocence of thousands of ordinary commuters was lost forever.

We are the people is a popular Loyalist slogan in Northern Ireland - a statement of loyalty, identity and devotion to and from Ireland's Protestants. This collection examines the meaning behind this legend, providing a critique of the issues which affect this heterogeneous community.

Synthesizing a vast body of scholarly work, Henry Patterson offers a compelling narrative of contemporary Ireland as a place poised between the divisiveness of deep-seated conflict and the modernizing - but perhaps no less divisive - pull of ever-greater material prosperity. Although the two states of Ireland have strikingly divergent histories, Patterson shows more clearly than any previous historian how interdependent those histories - and the mirroring ideologies that have fuelled them - have been. With its fresh and unpredictable readings of key events and developments on the island since the outbreak of the second world war, "Ireland Since 1939" is an authoritative and gripping account from one of the most distinguished Irish historians at work today.

This fifth edition has been extensively revised including:
* updates bringing the material covered up to 2001
* a combined chapter on Political Institutions and Local government, focusing on devolution and its effects
* the introduction of more debate and 'cultural' material
* new further reading sections at the end of each chapter
* an updated set of illustrations. _