As Lytton Strachey remarked of the Victorian era, writing the history of the Irish revolution is inhibited by the fact that we know too much about it. As the centenary of the 1916 Rising approaches, an avalanche of books, articles and television programmes is bearing inexorably down; even the re-enactments have begun, with Dublin’s city centre taken over last Easter Monday by jolly crowds in period dress, celebrating ‘the Road to the Rising’.
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'A Nation and Not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution, 1913–1923', £22.50 and 'Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World, 1918–1923', £14.49 are available from the Spectator Bookshop, Tel: 08430 600033. Roy Foster’s many books include Modern Ireland 1600–1972, Charles Stewart Parnell and Luck and the Irish.
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