the past.
We all have cause to be grateful to Oliver MacDonagh for his marvellous States of Mind, but here he just sweeps through Daniel O'Connell's life, looking particularly at his ideology. Readers will appreciate the confident tone that betrays someone wholly at ease with his subject and the definitive way in which he sets out O'Connell's wholly unromantic view of Ireland as a country that would benefit by adopting English. Theo Hoppen is at his best in his chapter, writing brilliant prose conveying deep insight. In particular, his comment that 'the Gaelic revival… was a profoundly modern phenomenon, dependent, above all, on the nostalgia which only the collapse of traditional Gaelic society could have engendered' shows how much a knife can gleam even as it is thrust into its target. His explanation of how Connacht clambered out of the cess-pit and onto the hearth-rug of the public imagination, and of how British governments came to promote Irish solutions for Irish problems is muscular and convincing - a very welcome addition to the corpus.
Brockliss and Eastwood make the point in their Conclusion that, while the French died for 'la France', the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish died for 'King and Country' - one and many. The point could stand as a description of the book. The real value of this collection, however, is that it allows readers to see for themselves how the regions compared. Once the reader has comprehended the degree to which the problem of modernisation prompted the same response amongst Welsh non-conformists and Irish Catholics, how Northern Irishmen and Southern Scots despised their agrarian brethren and how mercantilism and professionalisation led to similarly different regional identities, it becomes impossible to sustain the myth that modern borders form the best basis for a discussion of the past. Brockliss and Eastwood have done us a great service in undermining that myth and, as such, this book is to be warmly welcomed.

Sean McDougall,  Institute of Contemporary British History