"A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York--the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America. Meagher's rebirth in America included his leading...

"A first-ever biography of Oscar Wilde that places him within the context of his family and social and historical milieu finally tells the whole story of one of the most prominent characters of the late 19th century whose trial for indecency heralded decadence's demise - and his own,"--NoveList.

Few people in history have been as mythologized as Michael Collins. Before his death at the age of 31, Collins fought in the Easter Rising, organized the I.R.A., outspied British intelligence, negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and ran the first independent government of Ireland. To this day, millions revere him as the father of modern Ireland. Yet Collins was first and foremost a man who sought power and exercised it ruthlessly. More politician than...

She was married twice, divorced once, took a lover when she wanted, and gave birth to one of her sons on the deck of her own ship. She was Grace O'Malley, the sixteenth-century Irish woman who provoked awe, anger, admiration, and fear in the English men who, by persuasion and by the sword, came to conquer the land of her birth. Born in 1530, the daughter of an Irish chieftain, she inherited her father's taste for the seafaring life and eventually...