Vanishing Kingdoms

Here is Ireland's past distilled-poignant personal narratives and privileged moments, human behaviour recorded in its infinite variety, voices overheard: chamber music. In these pages Elizabethan adventurers, fops, soldiers, widows, landlords, republicans, poets, hedge-school masters and literary lesbians seem to dance through 400 years of Irish history. National events-the siege of Limerick, the battle of the Boyne, Wexford in 1798, the Famine, literary revival, 1916 Rising and Civil War-commingle with details of individual lives-procreation and recreation, courtship, food, clothing, religion, privation, death. Diaries of Ireland is an intimate history of everyday life on this island, a feast for mind and imagination.