The dominance of successive earls of Kildare in Anglo-Irish politics between 1470 and 1534 has prompted historians to label the period that of ‘the Kildare ascendancy’. This term denotes more than just the years in which the earls were in office; it includes assumptions about government policy, and the king’s relations with his Anglo-Irish magnates. From the later fourteenth century, the crown had normally maintained a deputy in Ireland directly from its English resources; and from his salary the deputy agreed to provide a retinue for the defence of the lordship. The scale of subvention and size of the retinue declined progressively, however, and the Irish revenues were too small to support a deputy lacking a substantial landed interest there: the king therefore sacrificed a degree of political control for financial economy and after 1478 relied almost exclusively on the local power of Kildare.

The publication of the first volume of A new history of Ireland to be issued from the press (volume iii of a set of nine volumes) is an event of the utmost significance in Irish historiography. It is the first-fruit of an ambitious proposal originally given an airing by Professor T. W. Moody in his presidential address to the Irish Historical Society in December 1962 and since pursued by him, through protracted discussions and negotiations, with rare tenacity, skill and devotion. In a longer perspective it is the culmination of forty years of sustained historical endeavour, which in its beginnings saw the foundation in 1936 of the Ulster Society for lrish Historical Studies and of the Irish Historical Society, and the first publication in 1938 of Irish Historical Studies, the journal sponsored by both societies, of which Professor Moody has since been joint editor.

Henry Edward Duke, 1st Lord Merrivale, is one of the forgotten men of Anglo-Irish relations. Duke’s chief secretaryship of Ireland has been eclipsed by that of his tragic predecessor, Augustine Birrell; and he has generally been regarded as a mere caretaker, a stop-gap chief secretary, who, in the words of The Times obituarist, showed neither ‘imagination’ nor ‘breadth of view’, and had ‘no appreciation of the Irish psychology’. If he is remembered at all, it is for his lapsus linguae at the opening of the Irish convention on 25 July 1917 when he declared, to an astonished audience, ‘Gentlemen, one thing I have learned in the course of my experience, never despair of the republic’.

If there is a top civil service adviser to the British government on imperial affairs in the early twentieth century whose influence was such that his biography is long overdue, it is Lionel Curtis. And in the context of recent Irish history, if there is a person whose role in shaping the British conception of the 1921 Anglo-Irish settlement has yet to be fully appreciated or analysed, it is again Lionel Curtis. Lord Longford’s references to Curtis in Peace by ordeal give some indication of the influence his ideas had on British cabinet ministers before and during the treaty negotiations in the summer and autumn of 1921. But a much fuller and more systematic survey of Curtis’s association with Ireland over a broader period is needed to measure this extraordinary man’s imprint on Anglo-Irish relations.