George Bernard Shaw was once asked if Ireland would ever stop producing great actors, to which he reputedly replied: ‘I’m afraid not.’ The same could be said of Dublin and writers.

To put that continuing deluge of words in context, history makes a good place to start. While there have been histories of Dublin since at least John T. Gilbert’s epic three volume tome (1854–1859), David Dickson’s Dublin: The Making of a Capital City (London: Profile, 2014) is the lively, authoritative, standard work, and is likely to remain so for many years; the book you are reading is much indebted to it. The same author’s The First Irish Cities: An Eighteenth-Century Transformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021) makes a useful supplement.