Michael Wheatley – författare

John Redmond's constitutional, parliamentary, Irish Party went from dominating Irish politics to oblivion in just four years from 1914-1918. The goal of limited Home Rule, peacefully achieved, appeared to die with it.Given the speed of the party's collapse, its death has been seen as inevitable. Though such views have been challenged, there has been no detailed study of the Irish Party in the last years of union with Britain, before the world war and the Easter Rising transformed Irish politics.Through a study of five counties in provincial Ireland - Leitrim, Longford, Roscommon, Sligo, and Westmeath - that history has now been written. Far from being 'rotten', the Irish Party was representative of nationalist opinion and still capable of self-renewal and change. However, the Irish nationalism at this time was also suffused with a fierce anglophobia and sense of grievance, defined by its enemies, which rapidly came to the fore, first in the Home Rule crisis and then in the war. Redmond's project, the peaceful attainment of Home Rule, simply could not be realised.

'…and then the music was so loud, so beautiful that I couldn’t think of anything else. I was completely lost to the music, enveloped by melody which was part of Pan.'In 1894, Arthur Machen’s landmark novella The Great God Pan was published, sparking the sinister resurgence of the pagan goat god. Writers of the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, such as Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster and Margery Lawrence, took the god’s rebellious influence as inspiration to spin beguiling tales of social norms turned upside down and ancient ecological forces compelling their protagonists to ecstatic heights or bizarre dooms.Assembling ten tales and six poems – along with Machen’s novella – from the boom years of Pan-centric literature, this new collection revels in themes of queer awakening, transgression against societal bonds and the bewitching power of the wild as it explores a rapturous and culturally significant chapter in the history of weird fiction.

'All about us on the stairs was some of the most exquisite statuary I have ever seen... save for a few pieces carved in the form of some hideous beast, the like of which I have never seen on earth...'The sunken continent of Atlantis has dwelt in the collective imagination of writers and artists for centuries; a bejewelled paradox bubbling with themes of irrecoverable loss and quixotic faith in its rediscovery. This new anthology collects stories from the vast, yet seldom recognised, vault of Atlantean fiction from the Golden Age of Weird Tales magazine, presented in four core sections, perfect for diving into:- Atlantis Rediscovered - in which the ruins of ancient Atlantis are found again.- Atlantis Revisited - tales of Deep Time, in which the descendants of Atlanteans re-live the experiences of ancestors.- Atlantis Resurrected - in which Atlantis never sunk at all but remains at large in the world.- Atlantis Reimagined - in which the continent is fertile ground for experiments in Weird Fantasy and beyond.

During the First World Warapproximately 210,000 Irish men and a much smaller, but significant,number of Irish women served in the Britisharmed forces. All were volunteers and a very high proportion were from Catholicand Nationalist communities. This book is the first comprehensive analysis ofIrish recruitment between 1914 and 1918 for the island of Ireland as awhole. It makes extensive use of previously neglected internal Britisharmy recruiting returns held at The National Archives, Kew, along with other valuablearchival and newspaper sources.There has been a tendency todiscount the importance of political factors in Irish recruitment, but thisbook demonstrates that recruitment campaigns organised under the auspices ofthe Irish National Volunteers and Ulster Volunteer Force were the earliest andsome of the most effective campaigns run throughout the war. The Britishgovernment conspicuously failed to create an effective recruiting organisationor to mobilise civic society in Ireland. While the military mobilisation whichoccurred between 1914 and 1918 was the largest in Irish history, British officialspersistently characterised it as inadequate, threatening to introduceconscription in 1918.This book also reflects on the disparity of sacrifice betweenNorth-East Ulster and the rest of Ireland, urban and rural Ireland, and Irelandand Great Britain.