Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923

Product Description

Vivid Faces surveys the lives and beliefs of the people who made the Irish Revolution: linked together by youth, radicalism, subversive activities, enthusiasm and love. Determined to reconstruct the world and defining themselves against their parents, they were in several senses a revolutionary generation.

The Ireland that eventually emerged bore little relation to the brave new world they had conjured up in student societies, agit-prop theatre groups, vegetarian restaurants, feminist collectives, volunteer militias, Irish-language summer schools, and radical newspaper offices. Foster's book investigates that world, and the extraordinary people who occupied it.

'Will change the way we see the entire way we see the 1916 Rebellion in Ireland . . . he has created a template for future historians.' Colm Tóibín, Guardian, Books of the Year

'Terrific . . . Foster's prose is urbanely precise and he can pin down character as memorably as Yeats.' John Kerrigan, Guardian

'Roy Foster's superb portrait of Ireland's revolutionary generation mines a rich seam of letters, diaries, articles, books and later recollections to create a compelling cultural history of the men and women, the ideas and passions, that forged a rebellion . . . There will doubtless be many more books to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising, but none, I suspect, more stimulating and important than this one.' Ben Macintyre, The Times, Books of the Year

'A powerful account of idealists going to war . . . Roy Foster has achieved what few have managed: an account of the Irish revolution that captures its quixotic ardour without succumbing to it . . . a wonderful book.' Gerard DeGroot, The Times