Irish republican Ernie O’Malley (1897–1957) might be judged to have had a doubly historical life. As one of the Irish Republican Army’s most significant figures during the 1916–23 Irish Revolution, he contributed distinctively to a major period in modern Ireland. Then, through his reflections on that era and its legacies, he arguably played an even more interesting role, leaving behind him some complex and valuable insights into his own and his contemporaries’ experience. O’Malley’s 1936 memoir On another man’s wound – still an inescapable source for the Irish Revolution – represents easily the most significant public element of this latter contribution. But there is also a wonderful body of Ernie O’Malley archival materials, as well as a shelf of other volumes of the I.R.A. man’s writings. The existence of the archival riches and of the shelf of Ernie O’Malley books owes much to his youngest child, Cormac O’Malley, who has assiduously devoted himself to collecting, making available and collaborating in the production of a library of material relating to his famous father. In editing Modern Ireland and revolution: Ernie O’Malley in context, O’Malley junior takes another valuable step towards the unveiling of, and the understanding of, O’Malley senior and his many resonances.

The book comprises a preface by Joseph Lee, an introduction by Nicholas Allen, eleven substantive chapters (the final one being an afterword by Roy Foster) and also a useful Ernie O’Malley bibliography. Lee rightly describes O’Malley as having had ‘a most colourful life’ (p. x), and the book is an appropriately intriguing one. Allen’s piece gently introduces readers to what the volume will involve, and it reinforces the importance of O’Malley’s own most important literary work: ‘I regard On another man’s wound as one of the great prose works of twentieth-century Ireland and a world classic on the subject of insurgency and the cultural imagination’ (p. xvi).

The subtlety and complexity of O’Malley’s own imagination is well captured in Luke Gibbons’s very thoughtful analysis of Ernie’s relationship to James Joyce and Irish modernism. Gibbons sharp-sightedly identifies, for instance, one of the very powerful aspects of O’Malley’s thinking, when he writes that, ‘One of the recurrent themes in O’Malley’s writing is the need to tear away the romantic illusions that provide a futile escape from harsh realities, while yet emphasizing the equal need to challenge the conformity and passivity (Joyce’s “paralysis”) that accepts such harsh realities as fate’ (p. 13).

Cormac O’Malley’s own chapter helpfully explores the evolution of On another man’s wound, while David Lloyd engages critically with much that has been written on Ernie O’Malley (including what he terms my own ‘insidiously ambivalent biography’ of the man (p. 81)). Despite – or, more probably, because of – our disagreements, I rather enjoyed Lloyd’s essay, combative and wide-ranging as it is. John Regan’s chapter on the June 1922 destruction of the Public Record Office in Dublin is also worth reading. As Regan notes, that fire and explosion marked ‘both the opening salvo in the Irish Civil War and a cultural atrocity unique in modern Irish history’ (p. 107). Much of Ireland’s national archive was destroyed in this Four Courts inferno, and Regan’s investigation of responsibility concludes with understandable ambiguity.

Eve Morrison’s superb chapter on Ernie O’Malley’s notebook interviews with Irish revolutionary veterans reflects her valuable work in this and other archive materials, and she locates his ‘combatant interviews’ as ‘one of many attempts by separatist nationalist veterans, both independently and officially, to document their war’ (p. 127). Morrison assesses the differences and similarities between the O’Malley record and the Bureau of Military History, and she wisely points out that the value of such sources lies not merely in their recording of factual detail; lies, silences and subjectivities can also be profoundly telling for the attentive scholar.

The volume closes with Roy Foster’s essay on ‘Revolutionary disillusionment’, a chapter which strongly grasps O’Malley’s enduring themes of loss, poignancy and disappointment. O’Malley here represented a unique version of a wider experience, evident also in the lives and reflections of people such as P. S. O’Hegarty, Peadar O’Donnell, Francis Stuart and Liam O’Flaherty. As Foster rightly observes, ‘The fact that the outcome of the revolution was so disillusioning for so many was a truth which was hard to bear, or to articulate’ (p. 189). O’Malley’s later years carried within them much personal sadness, as family fracture compounded other forms of isolation, pain and frustration. But his story remained, in Roy Foster’s apt phrase, ‘the story of the journey of a deeply original and powerful intelligence, coping with the fallout of an extraordinary youth and a saddened middle age’ (p. 192); so the elegiac themes within this complex human music should not obscure the brighter and more exhilarating melodies. And it is a fitting tribute to the rich legacy of the man that Foster’s brilliant essay concludes a book of such diverse fascination, built around one of modern Ireland’s most compelling figures.