The Shortest History of Ireland with James Hawes

In The Shortest History of Ireland, James Hawes reaches beyond the clichés to tell a dramatic new story, backed up by the latest scholarship. Join this local author for an evening of popular history at its finest!

Irish history is often seen as a mere catalogue of colonial repression. Yet Hawes shows that Ireland, its unique culture rooted in millennia of continuity, has always been able to assimilate would-be invaders. He reveals how the Irish, ever since the roaming saints and scholars of the early Middle Ages, helped shape Europe, then America. And he argues that, with its natural wealth, its extraordinary magnetism and its exiled children across the globe, the island only needs to sidestep the last, toxic wreckage of the British Empire for its turbulent past to flow into a bright future.

With 100s of maps and images, this is popular history at its best – a timeless drama of freedom and persecution, riot and revolution, empire and independence.

James Hawes published six novels with Jonathan Cape before turning his storytelling gifts to non-fiction. His two previous shortest histories, The Shortest History of Germany and The Shortest History of England, are both major international bestsellers. He has known Ireland since the 1970s, lectured for two years at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth and is married to an Irishwoman.