The history of modern Ireland, seen through the lives of its leaders |
My passion for history was ignited by political biography when I was a teenager. You read the life story of a person who – if the writer is any good – captures your attention like the protagonist of a novel; and along the way, almost by chance, you learn about the great events in which the person was a player. My strongest memory of Disraeli, from a 1951 book by Hesketh Pearson, is his maiden speech in the House of Commons in 1837, when, after being heckled and jeered at for his flamboyant dress and delivery, he said: ‘Though I sit down now, the time will come when you will hear me.’
These days I not only read biography but write it. So I seized on The Taoiseach, a collection of essays edited by Iain Dale, as a painless way to rectify my shameful ignorance of recent Irish political history and its leading figures. It consists of short biographies of each of the 16 men (they are all men so far) who have occupied the top position in Irish politics since the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922.
It did the job. I now know that Sean Lemass, when he was a 16-year-old Irish volunteer in 1916, played with his loaded revolver in........