Parnell is the most enigmatic figure in Irish history. An Anglo-Irish landlord from a distinguished and long-established Wicklow family, he became the most unlikely leader of Irish nationalism imaginable. None the less, from the late 1870s until his fall and death in 1891, he held the whole of Ireland spellbound. He established Home Rule for Ireland-previously a taboo subject in British politics-at the centre of Westminster affairs and effectively created the modern Irish state in embryo.

His fall was as dramatic as his rise. The affair with Mrs Katharine O'Shea, the mother of his three children, destroyed him. Paul Bew reinterprets this enigmatic man as one who was fundamentally conservative, who wished to reconcile his own landlord class to a new Ireland, and who acknowledged and accelerated the political demands of nationalist Ireland.

About the Author

Paul Bew is Professor of Political Science at Queen's University, Belfast and one of the most distinguished historians of modern Ireland. His most recent book is Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006.

Reviews

"Perhaps the most striking feature of Professor Paul Bew's book is how much is packed into so little space...his trick is not to dwell on the nuances of Parnell's upbringing...but to examine forensically every dramatic episode of the epic life"

Michael Foley, The Sunday Times

'A significant new assessment of Charles Stewart Parnell and his place in the politics of his period which is at once a masterpiece of compression and of clarity of expression.'
Maurice Hayes, Irish Independent

'A riveting portrait ... "astonishing" scarcely does justice to the political achievements of the deeply strange, even dysfunctional man at the heart of Bew's book ... How are we to reconcile the sleep-walking, paranoid inadequate who obsessed about the colour green and the number 13, with the parliamentary titan who came to terrify the Speaker of the Commons with his deadly procedural prowess by 1880?'
John-Paul McCarthy, The Spectator

'Bew's magnificent study leaves a deepened appreciation of the force of Joyce's characterisation of Parnell as an Irish leader who was "strong to the verge of weakness".'
Frank Callanan, The Sunday Independent

Book Information
ISBN 9780717154524
Author Paul Bew
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Gill & Macmillan Ltd
Publisher Gill
Weight(grams) 318g
Dimensions(mm) 197mm * 128mm * 20mm