Book description
Synthesizing a vast body of scholarly work, Henry Patterson offers a
compelling narrative of contemporary Ireland as a place poised between
the divisiveness of deep-seated conflict and the modernizing - but
perhaps no less divisive - pull of ever-greater material prosperity.
Although the two states of Ireland have strikingly divergent
histories, Patterson shows more clearly than any previous historian
how interdependent those histories - and the mirroring ideologies that
have fuelled them - have been. With its fresh and unpredictable
readings of key events and developments on the island since the
outbreak of the second world war, Ireland Since 1939 is an
authoritative and gripping account from one of the most distinguished
Irish historians at work today.
Henry Patterson is Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster.
His previous books include The Politics of Illusion: A Political History
of the IRA.
