Roy Foster has given us a meticulous and subtle portrait of a revolutionary generation. This was a generation which, he rightly reminds us, was not taken seriously by our greatest writers. Yeats, Shaw and Joyce, all in their different ways, believed that the real Ireland’s outlook, before 1916, was, in essence, mundane, pragmatic and materialist. Indeed, looking back in 1946, Eamon de Valera, one of Foster’s subjects here, told Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, that he agreed essentially with that literary verdict.

So how did we get to the epiphany of the Irish Revolution? Foster writes ‘Perhaps the Irish Revolution can be explored anew by summoning up those “vivid faces”, described by Yeats, getting behind those counters and desks into their lives and minds. … Studying their world and how they conceived it , both at the time and later, may show in turn how a revolutionary generation comes to be made, rather than born.’

There are risks in this beautifully accomplished book. Some sections on radical sexuality, for example are more impressionistic than others. ‘People ran away with each other to start Communist communes in Donegal’, Professor Foster notes. Yes, but how many people? The chapters on ‘Learning’ and ‘Writing’, for example, are, however, superbly grounded. But even here there is a risk – deliberately embraced by the author – that whilst this book is excellent on the fate of the Irish peasant as a literary production it is more generally Irish politics without the peasant. Michael Wheatley’s study of the grass roots rural nationalist mentality still retains certain relevance. Wheatley reveals a world of bellicose and sectarian Anglo-phobia which, in the end, rode roughshod over both the elegant compromises of Redmond-ism and the anti-sectarianism of the radicals. Perhaps also Professor Foster might have engaged more with the mosquito press’s representation of the economic relationship between Ireland and England, which was one of increased Treasury subsidy.

There is perhaps more to be said about the role of snobbery in rural Ireland in generating the Revolution. It is perfectly fair to say that the British state failed to give full acknowledgement to the Irish sacrifice in the First World War. There is an anguished comment in Lloyd George’s own papers making this point. Irish rural reluctance to be recruited, however, appears to have been founded in part on the reluctance of small farmers to be classed in the same rank as agricultural labourers. The I.R.A. was rather more respectful of local hierarchies than the British army.

The book poses one big question. How do we get from the generous enthusiasms of Ireland’s intelligentsia to the cruelty and repressive nature of the Irish Revolution itself? This was a revolution which Foster amply demonstrates deposited most of these early enthusiasts in a profound state of disillusionment which lasted for the rest of their lives. Foster tries to answer this in fine chapters on ‘Arming’ and ‘Fighting’. It might be worth mentioning here that Michael Mallin, though a fine shot, was a drummer boy all his time in the British army and therefore hardly suited for his senior command duties in 1916. Some things are easier to explain than others. The casual shooting of surprised policemen which James Connolly and Constance Markievicz were so keen on is to be explained by reference to the humiliation of the Fenians in 1867. In that year a very small detachment of R.I.C. men marched hundreds of Fenians into the centre of Dublin, their braces cut, so they could not escape. It was necessary to cross the line in a way that prevented any such collapse. But how do we analyse the decision of the insurrectionists to arm themselves with dum dum bullets?

There are a very few slips and omissions. Dermot Coffey’s reassurance as to the Irishness of his future wife, Cescia Trench, appears to relate more to her English birth and upbringing than to her Protestantism. F. J. Biggar’s role as a cultural enthusiast is well documented but his most important archive in Belfast, containing forty thousand documents all told, appears to have been neglected. The Burns’s Library also contains interesting material on at least two other actors – ‘AE’ and Molly Childers. There is frequent mention of Kevin O’Shiel’s unpublished memoir but Professor Eda Sagarra’s life of her father does not make the bibliography.

Overall, however, this book is a triumph not only of scholarship but of intellectual integrity.