Aug 11, 2021
‘The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one’s self to be acquainted with it’. A short account of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694 – 1773), British statesman, man of letters and arguably...
Aug 11, 2021
Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1721-65), the son of George II, was in disgrace after he led his army to inglorious defeat at the battle of Fontenoy. And then, like a football manager whose luck changes, he destroyed the Scots at Culloden. His brutal...
Aug 11, 2021
Before she became one of the founding philosophers of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft was governess to Viscount Kingsborough’s daughters at Mitchelstown Castle in north Cork. While Mary went on to marry William Godwin (and so became mother to Mary Shelley, author of...
Aug 11, 2021
An epic saga that follows the descendants of an opportunist farmer who became the principal baker to Oliver Cromwell’s troops in Ireland through to a murder in 1917. We meet one of Dean Swift’s greatest foes, families such as Bligh, Fownes and Bunbury, and a host of...
Aug 11, 2021
The story of the man who founded the famous brewery at St James’s Gate in Dublin, including his ancestral link to the MacCartans of County Down, the controversy of his birth in Celbridge , his bequest from Archbishop Price and his marriage to the heiress Olivia...
