Galway of the RacesBorn of a Belfast manse, Robert Lynd (1879 1949) became one of the most graceful and favoured writers of the early century, and had some thirty books published in his lifetime. The essays in Galway of the Races represent his writings on Ireland (Protestant and Papish, with accounts of Connolly, Kettle, Griffith, Shaw, Yeats and Joyce), on literature (from Donne to Hazlitt, Keats, Turgenev and Chekhov) and on life at large (the Great War, the British

The resulting book

based in Brussels

or follow an inner voice towards the priesthood

Classic Irish Houses of the Middle Size

But when Fashion Dictators change the fashion

As often as not it makes the reader shake her head in despair

presumably because of the offence it gave to Catholics

escaping to the hills on his home-made bicycle and raising racing pigeons in a make-shift loft

especially ‘when accompanied with the breaking of chairs’

Part II positions Ireland between the Old and New Worlds and contains Evans’ pioneering essays on the pastoral experience of Atlantic Europe

Finnegans Wake had never been recorded in its entirety despite Joyce’s recommendation that the text should be heard rather than read

Seventy Years Young reanimates a proximate but forgotten past with all the power of first-class fiction