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Over the past decade growing numbers of students have undertaken research into the religious dimension of the recent history of the British Isles, and in doing so have expanded its agenda away from the traditional focus on the history of doctrine and ecclesiastical institutions.
For the first fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, the Nazi persecution and mass murder of the Jews of Europe was rarely the subject of public debate or historical analysis. Only after the Eichmann trial did the term ‘Holocaust’ gain widespread acceptance.
Paul Bew has made an extraordinary contribution to Irish historiography over the past 30 years. With Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson he co-authored a landmark study, The State in Northern Ireland (1979).
Having extensively written on radical republicanism in 20th-century Ireland, Richard English approaches the subject of Irish nationalism with expertise.
'There is no man or movement’, according to the late Emmet Larkin, ‘that can be intelligibly discussed apart from the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland’.
'I HATE Cosmo Lang!’ exclaimed a member of the audience when Robert Beaken spoke to a seminar at the IHR about Lang, archbishop of Canterbury and subject of this important reassessment. As Beaken rightly notes, Lang’s reputation has suffered in the years since his death.
It is a rare thing for a reviewer to read a book which on its own terms, in its content and argument, leaves nothing open to serious criticism. Professor Diarmaid Ferriter’s Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s is one such book.
A dimension that has been either obscured or silenced in discussions of the First World War is that of the networks of intellectuals and activists who protested against this global conflagration.
God and Mrs Thatcher, as Eliza Filby herself makes clear, is not a biography. ‘God’, as represented by Church of England bishops, the Synod and Anglican congregations, the moral lobby, popular morality and the international Christian community, is as much the subject of Filby’s book as Thatcher is.
Peter Webster’s Archbishop Ramsey: the Shape of the Church is the best introduction to Michael Ramsey’s archiepiscopacy at Canterbury currently available, and should be read by everyone interested in the state of the Church of England in the 1960s.