If you want to understand how Ireland has got to where it is - and many don't - then Foster is your man. His Oxford professorship affirms his credentials as a serious historian, and his biography of the poet W. B. Yeats confirms that he can deploy the accurate if unreadable details. But don't worry; he is also a polemicist and a master of the craft that mere journalists call recycling, wrapping together old articles from learned journals into an argument that seems both cohesive and relevant to what goes on now.

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