Kevin Myers – författare

This book examines the construction of ethnic communities, and of multicultural policy, in post-war England. It explores how Irish and Afro-Caribbean immigrants responded to their representation as alien races by turning to history. In cultural and educational projects immigrants imagined, researched, wrote and pictured their pasts. They did so because they sought in the past dignity, a common humanity and an explanation of the hostility that had greeted them in England. But the meaning of the past is never fixed. Encouraged and conditioned by the burgeoning field of race relations, these histories were interpreted as expressions of difference. They asserted, it was claimed, specific ethnic needs and identities. They were the nation’s ‘other histories’. Drawing on a wide range of sources and covering many different debates, the book seeks to recover the inclusive historical imagination of radical scholars and activists who saw in the past the resources for a better future.

This sharp, stimulating title provides a structure for thinking about, analysing and designing case study. It explores the historical, theoretical and practical bones of modern case study research, offering to social scientists a framework for understanding and working with this form of inquiry.  Using detailed analysis of examples taken from across the social sciences Thomas and Myers set out, and then work through, an intricate typology of case study design to answer questions such as:

How is a case study constructed?What are the required, inherent components of case study?Can a coherent structure be applied to this form of inquiry?

The book grounds complex theoretical insights in real world research and includes an extended example that has been annotated line by line to take the reader through each step of understanding and conducting research using case study.

 

This sharp, stimulating title provides a structure for thinking about, analysing and designing case study. It explores the historical, theoretical and practical bones of modern case study research, offering to social scientists a framework for understanding and working with this form of inquiry.  Using detailed analysis of examples taken from across the social sciences Thomas and Myers set out, and then work through, an intricate typology of case study design to answer questions such as:

How is a case study constructed?What are the required, inherent components of case study?Can a coherent structure be applied to this form of inquiry?

The book grounds complex theoretical insights in real world research and includes an extended example that has been annotated line by line to take the reader through each step of understanding and conducting research using case study.

 

A memoir like no other, A Single Headstrong Heart passionately and intelligently reveals both the era and the individual. Funny, quirky and touching, this latest offering from Kevin Myers describes in a first-person narrative his childhood up to the early years of his career as a journalist and his departure from University College Dublin in the late 1960s. Related with a Rabelaisian verve, A Single Headstrong Heart is a prequel to Myers’ bestselling Watching the Door, set in Belfast at the height of the Troubles during the 1970s, and it has all the panache and particularity of that masterly book. As they grow up in Leicestershire, England, with regular holiday visits to Ireland, Kevin and his twin sister Maggie are sheltered by a mother’s domestic diligence and survive a father’s eccentricity and gradual disintegration. Being Irish and Catholic in an English provincial town brings fascinating tensions and analysis to bear on boarding school experiences, social status, sport and a burgeoning sexuality. The travails of puberty have rarely been so candidly depicted. Pop music, political awareness and modernity break in with the advent of the Sixties and modernity as this rare, ebullient personality undergoes social and political transformation. With a sometimes grotesque humour reminiscent of Roald Dahl, these recollections retain an authentic childlike sense of galloping self-importance in an adult re-casting. Broadly chronological, the main narrative arc is sustained by the author’s relationship with his father, with a startling denouement revealed after his father’s death that lends context to these vivid memories.

Here, name by name, parish by parish, province by province, Kevin Myers details Ireland’s intimate involvement with one of the greatest conflicts in human history, the First World War of 1914 to 1918, which left no Irish family untouched. With this gathering of his talks, unpublished essays and material distilled from The Irish Times and elsewhere, Myers lays out the grounds of his research and findings in Connaught, Leinster, Munster and Ulster. He revisits the main theatres of war in Europe – The Somme, Ypres and Verdun, the war at sea and Gallipoli. He documents these bloody engagements through the lives of those involved, from Dublin to Cork, Sligo to Armagh, to the garrison towns of Athy, Limerick, Mullingar and beyond. In Ireland’s Great War Myers uncoils a vital counter-narrative to the predominant readings in nationalist history, revealing the complex and divided loyalties of a nation coming of age in the early twentieth century. This remarkable historical record pieced together the neglected shards of Ireland’s recent past and imparts a necessary understanding of the political process that saw Sinn Féin’s electoral victory in 1918 and the founding of the Irish Free State. By honouring Ireland’s forgotten dead on the centenary of the Great War. Myers enables a rediscovery of purpose that will speak to future generations.