Mr. Denis Ireland might he described as a Dubliner born
in Belfast and self-educated everywhere from Los Angeles to Offaly. This book (Rich and Cowan, 7s. 6d.) is the journal (or rather pages from the journal) kept by hini from wartime to the present day. It is a charming, unpretentious, depre- ciatory, quizzical, methodless book ; essentially the scrapbook of a Dubliner, with all the disorder and facility characteristic of the Dubliner at home or abroad. Mr. Ireland, whether he is remembering things past in Belfast—a city " described by a French journalist who 'visited it during the troubles as une vine sanglante" : eschewing the obvious, Mr. Ireland translates this as a bleeding city—or ducking the shells at Ypres, or selling Irish linen to Englishmen or to Americans, or sucking his pipe in an undergraduate's rooms in Trinity College,. Dublin, wherever he may be and whatever he may see, retainsthe quaint and self-assured provincialism of -the true Dubliner. Handel produced at Dublin is to him an event of European importance, and no doubt a public house without Guinness or Jameson would seem a poor house to Mr. Ireland. He talks, or writes, like a Dubliner too : referring everything to practical par- ticulars, and consequently finding most things rather funny. A book for the bedside—unless, of course, you want to"go to sleep.
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