A collection of Ireland's greatest and best-loved ballads, including the lyrics, music and chords, along with an introductory piece on each song. Illustrated with photographs and woodcuts. A beautiful guide to the cream of the Irish ballad tradition. Songs of love, yearning, revolution, celebration, emigration, mourning, fun, famine, drinking and more. A collection of powerful yet beautiful ballads of Ireland, placed in and reflecting historical events and traditions. All have stood the test of time and present to the world the uniqueness of Irish history and her musical and revolutionary traditions. Including: Are You Right There Michael? Danny Boy Kevin Barry I'll Tell Me Ma The Irish Rover Molly Malone The Rare Old Mountain Dew The Rocky Road to Dublin The Rose of Tralee Whiskey in the Jar Best-Loved Irish Ballads celebrates the songs and tradition of Irish music.

Ethna MacCarthy (1903-59) was a Scholar and a First-Class Moderator at Trinity College Dublin where she taught languages in the thirties and forties before studying medicine. Perhaps best known to posterity for her relationship with Samuel Beckett and appearance in several of his writings, including the play Krapp's Last Tape, she also had a remarkable influence on a number of writers such as Denis Johnston and Con Leventhal, who she later married. Found among Leventhal's papers when he died were MacCarthy's overlooked work, revealing a highly intelligent and culturally sophisticated poet. This collection, published here for the first time, unearths an exceptionally rich and intriguing body of work by a remarkable woman who was ahead of her time. MacCarthy played an important and creative part of a cosmopolitan and free-thinking post-Independence Dublin, publishing translations from Spanish and German poets before developing a highly distinctive style of her own. Her poetry contains exposed lunar and death-haunted landscapes, tales of multifaceted women, and subversive ideas around femininity. Her work highlights a gifted translator who artfully captures the feeling evoked by the original languages. According to Denis Johnston `she has never been shy, can be frank, and outspoken to a degree, is absolutely fearless, intolerant of mediocrity and finds it difficult to suffer fools gladly'. MacCarthy merits reappraisal as an intellectual presence in an age that did not often promote, if acknowledge at all, the woman's voice. This unique collection of Ethna MacCarthy's poems is published as an innovative first step in establishing her as one of the outstanding Irish poets of the mid-20th century.

A beautiful and simple introduction to the Book of Kells, one of the world's most famous illuminated manuscripts, with a newly-expanded colour plate section. Here George Otto Simms, a world-renowned authority on the Book of Kells, reveals the mysteries hidden in this magnificent manuscript. He introduces the monks who made the book and guides the reader through the intricate detail of this ancient and exotic book. Also available in French, German, Spanish and Japanese.

'THERE ARE MANY facets to Samuel Beckett's writing - humour, despair, love, poignancy, suffering - but for me there is one dominant characteristic, compassion, compassion for the human condition of existence.' So begins Eoin O'Brien's title essay, an observation that encapsulates the collection as it broadens out into convergent streams of essays on literature and medicine. Part One focuses on the nature of friendship and connectivity, on the role of the 'good doctor' and the individual in society. Intimate portraits of literary Dublin of the twentieth century and earlier, Samuel Beckett, Con Leventhal, Nevill Johnson, Denis Johnston, Micheal MacLiammoir and Petr Skrabanek; Corrigan, Gogarty and Korotkoff, Chekhov and Handel, speak of exemplars past and values present, as the influence of the arts is inscribed on a doctor's life and work. The Beckett essays alone yield remarkable commentary on Ireland's greatest early modernist, and include a little-known account of the Irish Hospital at Saint-Lo in Normandy, where Beckett worked as a storekeeper in a poignant drama of 'humanity in ruins' that informed his subsequent work. 'The Corruption of Privilege', addressed in Part Two, looks incisively at the practice and history of the author's profession within Ireland and elsewhere, at medical education and the medical establishment; at medical journalism, humanitarian involvement, and at broader issues - landmines in the Third World and the plight of colleagues in Bahrain. Invaluable archival images of Beckett, Con Leventhal, Nevill Johnson and others - some sixty in all - underpin the writings of this chronicler and observer of Ireland's recent past.

In a deep leafy wood, by a slow-moving stream, Where butterflies flutter through golden sunbeams, Lives a beautiful fairy called Flossie McFluff. She's tiny and shiny, but Flossie is tough. She has magical powers; she knows magic words; And she cares for the trees and the bees and the birds. Wee Flossie lives high in an ancient oak tree, And lives for adventure, as we shall soon see ... Three stories in rhyme about a little fairy who looks after the forest. In the first tale, she gives some litter louts a scare, then she helps a lonely banshee find some friends, and finally helps her leprechaun friend Paddy Potts find his missing gold.

Nevill Johnson is better known as a painter and photographer than as a writer. Eoin O'Brien, close friend of Nevill Johnson and literary executor of his estate, has edited his writings in this volume for the first time. The resulting book, provides an intriguing insight into the life of one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century.

The Book of Kells is the most famous hand-coloured book in the world. Here's your chance to colour some of the drawings as the monks did over a thousand years ago. Choose from over sixty drawings of heavenly figures, Biblical people, fantastic creatures, floral, animal and bird motifs, intricate Celtic letters, spirals and designs - and create your own treasures and pull-out poster. You can also colour pictures of the monks themselves making the wonderful Book of Kells in their time, using the tools and materials of their day.

In his memoir, A Life in Medicine: From Asclepius to Beckett, Eoin O’Brien, a cardiologist with an international reputation as a clinical scientist, recounts his life in medicine and literature. He depicts his relatively privileged upbringing in a medical family in the impoverished city that was post-war Dublin and describes his intensely Catholic schooling in St Conleth’s School and Castleknock College, and his eventual rejection of religion. O’Brien describes his training in medicine in the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin and in its teaching hospitals, the Richmond and the Rotunda, with personal vignettes of his teachers and how doctors were trained in the nineteen fifties. Moving to England to specialise as a cardiologist, he recounts, from the unique vantage point of a front-line doctor, the early development of the exciting speciality of cardiology. He was actively involved in the development of coronary care units, in which the then horrendous mortality from heart attack would be reduced with the introduction of new drugs, pacemakers and the techniques of resuscitation and defibrillation. Back in Dublin, O’Brien describes the practice of medicine in the city, and how he and his colleagues established a research unit that would gain international recognition for the treatment of patients with high blood pressure. He traces his role in many activities, including journalism and recording the history of Dublin’s voluntary hospitals, which were being closed to usher in a new era of hospital care. O’Brien’s interest in literature brought into a close friendship with many remarkable writers and artists that included Samuel Beckett, Nevill Johnson, Con Leventhal, Edith Fournier, Brian O’Doherty and Niall Sheridan and in the final section, he writes about these associations, giving unique glimpses into the lives of many remarkable people. His recollections of Samuel Beckett, alone, make this an essential text for those interested in the Nobel Prize-winning writer.