Irish Biography

This book is a collaborative enterprise, British, French and Irish, representing the countries where Peter Rice passed most of his life and the cultures that formed him.

Reprint. So Far, So Good recounts the story of an ordinary man who has enjoyed extraordinary adventures. Paddy Barry explored remote parts of the world, often on his Galway Hooker sailing boat. From Siberia to Tierra del Fuego, Connemara to Malawi, on mountains and on sea, Paddy has endured hardships very few could match.

Bestselling author and psychologist Tony Bates has spent his career seeking to understand the lives of others. Here he turns his therapeutic eye on himself and describes the events and people in his own life that have made him the insightful thinker and teacher that he is today. He recalls traumatic events in his childhood that reverberated throughout his life and how, with therapy and time, he was eventually able to heal.

In this contemplative short narrative, artist and acclaimed writer Sara Baume charts the daily process of making and writing, exploring what it is to create and to live as an artist. Elegantly encompassing images and in itself a significant artefact, handiwork offers observations that are at once gentle and devastating on the nature of art, grief and a life lived well.

What happens when a loved one walks out the door one day and doesn't come back? Bring Him Home -The Search for Ronan is a powerful and poignant true story of mental health, homelessness, overcoming massive challenges and how one family was determined, no matter what, to bring their brother Ronan home.

The Irish composer, Ina Boyle (1889-1967), was born in Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow. She started to compose from an early age and soon found a passion for music that lasted a lifetime, spanning two world wars, the 1916 rebellion, the war of independence, the civil war and the economic war

The immigration man read my deportation order, looked at it and handed it back to me. Not only is it the last instalment of a unique and unorthodox autobiography, but of a unique and unorthodox life that was as touched with genius as it was with doom.

'I have him bitched, balloxed and bewildered, for there's a system and a science in taking the piss out of a screw and I'm a well-trained man at it.' So writes Brendan Behan, poet, writer and literary legend, of the episode that coloured his life.

In this anthology of critical writing, film-maker and academic Desmond Bell draws upon his extensive experience as a sociologist, media scholar and film-maker to explore a range of issues of culture identity, politics and art in Ireland, north and south.