-
Twenty-five Views in Colour Aquatint ISBN: 978-0-85105-425-4 10.7 x 14.8 cm landscape xi, [53] pp. 25 full colour prints Georgian Dublin is a pocket-sized edition of Malton's superb colour aquatints which show Dublin city in its finest age – the period in which the present layout of the city emerged and during which many of its classical buildings were erected. These lively and colourful prints open a window to the past and reveal scene after scene which, with one exception, can still be visited today. The views range from the great courtyard of Dublin Castle, past Gandon's riverfront masterpieces, the Custom House and the Four Courts, to the simple street scene at Capel Street bridge, peopled with the Dubliners of two centuries ago. -
24.5 x 17.5 cm. 32 pp. with 16 illus. Third edition, with extra illus. 1995 (First published by Dolmen Press in 1965, 2nd edition 1977) In 1917 the Norman Tower at Ballylee in the West of Ireland was adopted by W.B. Yeats as his home. But the tower was much more than his residence. It became his monument and symbol. Here he conceived and wrote some of his greatest poetry, and in his inscription to commemorate its restoration he predicted the ruinous state into which the building lapsed after his death. The restoration of the Tower in the 1960s was inspired mainly by the enthusiasm of the Kiltartan Society and Mary Hanley. Liam Miller edited and extended Mrs Hanley’s text to set Yeats’s occupancy in a historical context. The illustrations include plans of the Tower, a map of the locality, photographs taken in the years when Yeats lived there, and some sketches by Lady Gregory. The front cover illustration is of T. Sturge Moore’s design for the front cover and jacket of the first edition of The Tower (1928) as it appeared when blocked on the book. -
Edited by Alan Price paperback 21.4 cm. J.M.Synge died in 1909 and The Works of John M. Synge were published in four volumes by Maunsel & Co., Dublin, in 1910. Since that time, with the exception of a few minor verses and one or two fragments of prose, the canon of his work has remained unaltered. Nevertheless, much unpublished material exists, for the most part of great interest and significance for the understanding of Synge's methods of work and development. This material, including early drafts of the plays, notebooks, poems, and fragments of poetic drama, has now been thoroughly explored in order to create this definitive edition, first published by Oxford University Press 1962-68, which not only collects together all that is of significance in his printed and in his unprinted work, but also, by a careful use of worksheets and early drafts, indicates much of the process of creation which occurred before the production of the printed page. The Collected Works is in four volumes, under the general editorship of the late Professor Robin Skelton, of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, who began the series with his edition of the poems and translations. -
Illustrated by Joyce Dennys. With a prefatory note by Maurice Collis ISBN: 978-0-86140-010-2 19.0 x 13.5 cm. 128 pp. 1978 (reduced facsimile of first 1970 hardcover edition) Lady Gregory was the cornerstone of the Irish Literary Revival in the first quarter of the century. At Coole Park in Co. Galway she was host to many literary figures and painters of the time: W. B. Yeats of course, J. M. Synge, Bernard Shaw, Douglas Hyde, A. E. (George W. Russell), Sean O'Casey, John Masefield, George Moore, and among the painters, J. B. Yeats the elder, Jack B. Yeats and Augustus John. As well as spending a large part of her time as hostess of Coole, being a prolific author and playwright, a Director of the Abbey Theatre, the chief campaigner for the return of the Lane Pictures to Dublin, and an excellent landlord, she is remembered as a great personality. -
Widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s finest pianists, Artur Schnabel (1882-1951) was especially renowned as an interpreter of Beethoven. In the words of his friend Edward Crankshaw, his performance of the Diabelli Variations in his last years was ‘like looking at the sun without dark glasses’. However, Schnabel also earned high praise for his playing of Schubert, Mozart, and Brahms. Indeed, his later concert repertoire was largely devoted to great composers in the Austro-German tradition. In explanation, Schnabel contended that he wished to play only ‘music that was better than it could be performed’. His uncompromising, passionate commitment to penetrating the mysteries of the greatest music is clearly revealed in this absorbing, highly readable combination of personal reminiscence and musical manifesto. Not a conventional autobiography, it includes a transcript of 12 autobiographical lectures Schnabel gave to music students at the University of Chicago in 1945. The lectures were followed by informal sessions in which the pianist answered questions from the audience on a wide variety of musical topics. These questions and Schnabel’s revealing, unrehearsed replies comprise the second part of this book, offering rich insight into the pianist’s personality and musical philosophy. The final section, ‘Reflections on Music’, is a talk Schnabel gave on the occasion of receiving an honorary degree from the University of Manchester. -
Edited by A. Norman Jeffares and Anna MacBride White 21.6 x 13.8 cm. paperback Maud Gonne MaeBride is part of Irish history: her foundation of the women's group Inghinidhe na hEireann. the Daughters of Ireland, in 1900, was the key that effectively opened the door of politics in the twentieth century to Irishwomen. Still remembered in Ireland for the fiery, emotive public speeches she made on behalf of the suffering – those evicted from their homes in the West of Ireland, the Treason-Felony prisoners on the Isle of Wight, indeed all those whom she saw as victims of the imperialism she constantly opposed – she is known, too, within and outside Ireland as the woman W. B. Yeats loved and celebrated in his poems -
ISBN: 978-0-86140-319-6 23.4 x 15.5 cm. 189 pp. incl. over 100 illus. This book contains Revd Geoffrey Edmonds’ work, last published by this company in 1968, and Dr Audrey Baker’s hitherto unpublished history of Bulstrode, past home of Judge Jeffreys, the Dukes of Portland and then the Dukes of Somerset. While Chalfont St Peter dates back to before the Norman Conquest, and Bulstrode to the time of the Knights Templar, the parish of Gerrards Cross is a newly formed entity, being carved out of five neighbouring parishes, and greatly expanded following the 1906 opening of the London to High Wycombe Great Western & Great Central Joint Railway line which passed through the village. Through their separate histories both Dr Baker and the Revd Edmonds chart the history of the locality through the centuries, showing how it has evolved from Anglo-Saxon and medieval times, through the Reformation, the Cromwellian period and Restoration, the Hanoverian and Victorian eras to the 20th century, and how the great families who came to live here gained or lost power, rose, fell or moved on, as well as the creation of Gerrards Cross over the past century. -
Horace Plunkett is remembered for his efforts to transform Irish agricultural practice, through the Co-operative Movement which he founded in 1889, and its administration via the Department of Agriculture, which he established ten years later. From a protestant ascendancy background, Plunkett was one of those ‘fenian unionists' who were always able to see both sides of the Irish Question, and whose reforming zeal, and frank expression of opinion, during the period in which Ireland moved from benevolent Tory rule by Westminster, to independence for the south and partition of the island, brought him into conflict with all shades of political opinion. -
25.5 x 17.8 cm. xii, 116 pp. 2005 with 69 illus. Harry Furniss (1854–1925) was a well-known if somewhat abrasive figure in English literary, artistic and political circles during the half century either side of 1900. In March 1905, at the invitation of the Dickens Fellowship, he delivered in London’s Memorial Hall a platform lecture on Dickens and his illustrators, “A Sketch of Boz,” illuminated by some sixty magic lantern slides. Over the next two years Furniss toured the provinces with an enlarged version of this lecture. An Edwardian’s View of Dickens and His Illustrators is an edited and annotated transcription of the unpublished manuscript of this engaging lecture, together with the original illustrations, some of which are Furniss’s own. -
Selected Prose & Related Documents 336 pp. 23.4 x 13.5 cm illus. in colour and monochrome Poet of the Second World War and peacetime dramatist, Francis Warner was 75 this year (2012). This, the first selection from his prose, gives readers of his work some indication of the historical and intellectual background from which his poetry has sprung: of 'the giant race before the flood' who lived on to help shape Britain's post-war imagination. Starting with memories of the Blitz and his poem 'Blitz Requiem', Warner recalls his schooldays at Christ's Hospital, Horsham, recovering from six years of war, and the role played by music. He writes of his friends: 'Henry Chadwick: Musician', Kathleen Raine as fellow poet, C. S. Lewis and the Psalms, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Edmond Blunden, and Samuel Beckett, reproducing the manuscripts off two short plays Beckett discussed with and gave to him. Other subjects include W. B. Yeats, Benjamin Britten and the Japanese Noh plays, Samuel Palmer as poet, and Hugh Wybrew's Liturgical Texts of the Orthodox Church. -
General Editors of the Coole Edition: T. R. Henn CBE and Colin Smythe With a Foreword by T. R. Henn ISBN: 978-0-900675-35-5 Studies and Translations from the Irish, including nine plays by Douglas Hyde 22.7 x 13.8 cm. 286 pp. illus. 1974 Volume 11 of the Coole Edition of Lady Gregory's works In Poets and Dreamers Lady Gregory has gathered together a number of essays and translations she had made from the Irish of Douglas Hyde, An Craoibhin Aoibhinn, ‘the Sweet Little Branch’, who was founder and President of the Gaelic League at the time and later to be the first President of the Republic of Ireland. -
Edited by James Pethica ISBN: 978-0-86140-306-6 22.3 x 15.5 cm. with 16 pp. with 36 illus. These diaries, covering the decade or so following the death of her husband in 1892 until they peter out in 1902, chart the course of Lady Gregory's gradual but remarkable remaking of her life. Widowed at thirty-nine, with a London social circle composed mainly of her husband's friends, broadly Unionist in her political views, and with only a few minor publications to her name, she was by her fiftieth year an influential Nationalist, close friend of the major figures of the Irish literary movement, widely acknowledged as the hostess of a `workshop of genius' at Coole Park, and on the threshold of lasting literary prominence in her own right.
