In 1960, the original version of the Shaping of modern Ireland was published by Routledge. This collection of biographical essays, edited by Conor Cruise O’Brien, a historian and diplomat, was an early attempt to make a reassessment of events that were instrumental in the creation of the modern Irish state. In fifteen chapters – written by distinguished writers and historians – it surveyed the period through the lives of twenty men whose ‘influence was felt in Ireland in the interval between the fall of Parnell in 1891 and the Rising of 1916’.

Fifty-six years later, in the centenary year of the Easter Rising, a new volume inspired by O’Brien’s project has been expertly put together by Eugenio Biagini, a professor at Cambridge University, and Daniel Mulhall, the Irish ambassador to Great Britain. The two editors originally met at an event hosted by Cambridge University’s Seminar in Modern Irish History in February 2014. There they found a shared interest in this period of Irish history, and both came to feel that it was time for an update of O’Brien’s project in the light of the centenary of the Easter Rising. The original editor described his collection of essays as ‘an interrogation by a cross-section of contemporary Ireland of a significant cross-section of its own past’. Biagini and Mulhall’s book is a worthy successor to O’Brien’s in this regard. And they have done a great service to the historical community by updating the collection of essays with reference to more recent scholarship on the issues it discusses.

But this new volume is not a simple update of the old. Existing biographical subjects have been re-grouped and new ones added. The new collection of essays now examines the lives and impact of some thirty-one subjects (including Conor Cruise O’Brien himself) in seventeen interesting and very readable chapters. Nineteen of the original twenty characters in O’Brien’s book have been kept. (The exception is William Patrick Ryan (1867–1942), a socialist journalist, who has faded from historical interest over the intervening half-century). The additional characters are, to a great part, deserving of attention. They are Éamon de Valera, Michael Collins, John Dillon, James Joyce, George Russell, Maud Gonne MacBride, Dr Katherine Lynn, Dorothy Macardle (the sole female contributor to the original book), Countess Markievicz, Eva Gore-Booth, the Guinness family and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington.

One more notable change from the original project is that this is no longer just a book about the impact of twenty men on Ireland, excluding women from its analysis. One-fifth of the subjects of the new book are female, including figures such as Countess Markievicz who played an important role in the events of 1916 and beyond. This does much to balance the book, although it should be noted that all six women chosen were nationalists. The addition of female unionist voices could have helped widen the scope of the book further.

Indeed, the editors admit in their preface that the volume – like O’Brien’s original – could have done with more essays about other influential unionists, men and women, from both north and south of the border. The book does have an excellent chapter on Edward Carson, the leading figure in the anti-home rule campaign, by Professor Biagini, and an equally superlative one on William Pirie and Horace Plunkett by Mary Daly. But the book could have gone much further to address the problem of Ulster for Irish nationalism in its other essays. For the shape of modern Ireland – its borders, its politics and its civil wars – is the result of the partition of the island in 1922. This consequence of the irreconcilable aims of both nationalists and unionists during this period perhaps required more emphasis then given here.

A further area that is neglected – and the reviewer means this as a pointer for future work in this areas rather than as a criticism of the book – is that many of the issues and personalities in the book did as much to shape the future of the remainder of the United Kingdom as they did Ireland. Edward Carson’s legacy in the shape of partition and the Ulster Unionist Party’s political dominance over Northern Ireland tilted British politics to the right for the rest of the century. And even then, the fight for home rule had a long-lasting impact on liberal and left-wing progressive thought in Britain for decades, as Professor Biagini has shown in a previous project. And many of those who came to shape modern Britain were shaped by their own experiences of events in Ireland before independence. Many of those running Dublin Castle in these years achieved high office in Britain after independence, and some were radicalised by the events of 1916 into vehement unionists, most notably Brendan Bracken, an Irishman who was the founder of the modern Financial Times as well as Winston Churchill’s special advisor and minister for information during the Second World War.

In spite of these very minor comments, Professor Biagini and Mr Mulhall’s book is a worthy successor to O’Brien’s original project. Some of the chapters in the book are highly analytical and aimed at academics in their style; others are narrative and accessible to a broader audience. Although a survey of existing ideas rather than a novel piece of research, this book should interest both Irish historians and general readers alike for many years to come.