David Horspool

Those fearless men, but few

In an effort to make things better, the founding fathers of the Irish Republic made things much, much worse, according to Ruth Dudley Edwards’s The Seven

issue 09 April 2016

While reading this book in a London café, I was politely buttonholed by an Irishman: ‘Sorry to disturb you, but I saw what you were reading and wondered how far back it went.’ I answered that, as it was a group biography of the men who led the Dublin Easter Rising of 1916, it began with the eldest of them, Tom Clarke, in the mid-19th century.

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