Most biographies are too long, and almost all make an exaggerated claim for their subject. Caleb Wood Richardson's study of R. M. Smyllie, the legendary editor of the Irish Times, avoids both of these pitfalls. Richardson's book, part biography, part primer on Protestant history, part corrective to the grand tragedy narrative of southern Protestantism, is above all a case study that demonstrates how members of the minority could succeed, and thrive, in independent Ireland.

R. M. Smyllie was born in Glasgow in 1892, and raised in Sligo, where his father was editor-proprietor of a unionist newspaper. After a short career in Trinity College Dublin, Smyllie had the misfortune, while working as a tutor for an American family in Germany, to be interned at the outbreak of the First World War. He was sent to Ruhleben, which housed (loosely defined) British civilians near Berlin. Here, Smyllie's unionism, which never left him, was evident: he gave Roger Casement a hostile reception when the latter came looking for recruits for his Irish brigade. Ruhleben may have been as formative as military service; for the rest of his life, Smyllie's Irishness and Protestantism would be complemented by a strong international perspective.

This outlook would become apparent when he joined the Irish Times, where his first major assignment was covering the Paris peace conference. Here, he warned against Irish exceptionalism, or a sense that Ireland had things worse than elsewhere: ‘Central Europe’, he claimed, ‘is strewn with Irelands’. Later, he would invite readers to took to Czechoslovakia, another new state wrestling with the problems of majorities and minorities, first as an exemplar, and later as a cautionary tale. Members of minority groups, he suggested, have as much responsibly to seek reconciliation as members of the majority.

One of the core narratives of southern Protestantism since independence has been the community's gradual espousal of liberal perspectives, which were frequently at odds with the views held by the Catholic church. One of the core narratives of this book is the ways in which Smyllie, who took on the editorship of the Irish Times in 1934, used his position to promote this liberal outlook. Although he tried to learn Irish, and even taught ‘elementary and beginners’ classes in the language at Ruhleben, his paper was a persistent opponent of compulsion. Furthermore, the Irish Times's criticism of the censorship laws during the cause célèbre over Eric Cross's The tailor and Ansty and Kate O'Brien's The land of spices in 1942. Perhaps more significant was Smyllie's long-running – and often extremely funny – attempts to undermine the regime of wartime censorship.

We know Smyllie best as the eccentric, ebullient, and domineering leader of Dublin's most famous literary salon, which met in the Palace Bar on Fleet Street. Here, every evening, the editor held court, surrounded by a motley group of poets, painters, lawyers, bankers, businessmen and others, attracted to ‘its constant stream of conversation that even by Dublin standards was particularly inspired and particularly vicious’. Indeed, not everyone seems to have felt welcome: for Cyril Connolly, it was ‘as warm and friendly as an alligator tank’. This must have been a punishing regimen; Richardson notes that two of the most prolific Dublin-based writers of the era, Seán Ó Faoláin and Frank O'Connor, were rarely to be seen.

Smyllie's Ireland is not a conventional biography. Indeed, there are substantial sections where the subject disappears from view entirely. Rather than offering a comprehensive life, Richardson uses Smyllie as a well-chosen case study to demonstrate, not the alienation of Protestants from independent Ireland, but rather their integration within it. As such, this book can be viewed within a recent historiographical trend away from what we might call the ‘decline and fall’ genre of writing about southern Protestants. Of course, we must not – and Richardson does not – elide the ambiguities that underlay the southern Protestant experience. Lionel Fleming, one of Smyllie's protégés, argued that ‘Anglo-Ireland’ should, as Richardson writes, ‘drop the first half of its hyphenation, without losing its identity’. Smyllie is representative of the many Protestants who may have regretted the passing of the old order, but quickly came to terms with the new state, and made a strong contribution to it. In all of this, Richardson proves an accomplished guide. This witty, insightful and perceptive book deserves a wide audience.