Robert Kee
By far the most important book for me this year has been Roy Foster's Modern Ire- land: 1600-1972 (Allen Lane, £18.95), a brilliant compendium of incisive and con- structive thought on Irish history. The necessary demolition job of demythologis- ing that area has long been in progress. Foster here builds upon it with impressive academic panache. But do not expect a relatively easy Antonia Fraser-type histor- ical read. If you think that's what you want go to her Boadicea's Chariot (Weidenfeld, £14.95). More contemporary: Edward Pilkington's lucid and well researched account of the Notting Hill race-riots (anti- black) of 1958, Beyond The Mother Coun- try (I. B. Tauris, £10.95), refreshingly illuminates much of the background to racial problems in Britain today. The re-appearance in paperback of Katharine Tynan's Life of Kenneth Tynan (Methuen, £5.95) is a reminder of how much more she achieved in that work than just a readable and vivacious account of a colourful perso- nality whose colour inevitably fades with time. She here deals a blow at time. Tynan was a genius, if a wayward one. She writes that she was 'forever astonished' by him. We can now be too.
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