Specifications: 6" x 9" size; 244 + xxvi pages; 40 illustrations; well indexed by surname. Includes Castles in County Kerry; family seats of power; locations; variant spellings of family names; full map of County Kerry, coats of arms, and sources for research. From ancient times to the modern day. First Edition in dust jacket. Author/Editor: Michael C. O'Laughlin. Please remember that the first book in the Irish Families Project, "The Book of Irish Families, great & small" has information on Kerry families not contained in this book.

This is the master volume to the 28 book set on Irish Family History from the Irish Genealogical Foundation. The largest and most comprehensive of the series, this volume includes family histories from every county in Ireland and Northern Ireland. It also has, for the first time, the complete surname index for the entire series. The 27 other books which are indexed in this volume will provide additional information on even more families.

A County Wexford ascendancy house saved twice by rebel intervention in 1798 and 1922, Monksgrange tells a distinctive story of Irish history from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Its people were not ordinary. One landlord had fought slavery in the American Civil War, another was a novelist, and another an agricultural reformer and senator in the independent Irish state. An eminent historian of medieval Ireland lived there and a beautiful garden was created in the Arts and Crafts style. The furniture for Dublin's Country Shop was made there, and a carp pool built by the Cistercians in the thirteenth century attests to the property's much earlier history. This book illuminates important aspects of Irish history and chronicles how this talented family experienced and survived the many vicissitudes of Irish life over two centuries. A postscript shows how the house continues to play a positive role in contemporary Irish life.

William Orpen (1878-1931) was in 1917 appointed as an official war artist in France. He not only saw the Great War as a call to paint serious subject-matter—enabling him to break away from the constraints of society portraiture in London—but also as an opportunity to write. Orpen was commissioned, along with artists such as Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and Wyndham Lewis, to paint for the Department of Information. He was the only war artist to keep a written record of his wartime experience, published in 1921 as An Onlooker in France. In his Preface, Orpen rather too modestly states: “This book must not be considered as a serious work on life in France behind the lines, it is merely an attempt to record some certain little incidents that occurred in my own life there.” This art-historical study is a companion to this “attempt”. It examines, within the context of the global crisis that WWI was, and from various theoretical, philosophical and literary angles, his singular and at times provocative work. Orpen set out to provide a textual and visual record of life on the Western Front, as well as behind the lines—of what was supposed to be the “War to End all Wars”. For want of being a “fighting man”, the non-combatant artist-writer determined to fight with his own arms, his pens and brushes.

What was life like for Irish Protestants between the mid-17th and the late-18th centuries? Toby Barnard scrutinizes social attitudes and structures in every segment of Protestant society during this formative period.