Terence Brown juxtaposes such key topics as nationalism, industrialization, religion, language revival, and censorship with his assessments of the major literary and artistic advances to give us a lively and perceptive view of the Irish past. In the first two parts, he analyzes the ideas, images, and symbols that provided the Irish people with part of their sense of national identity. He considers in Part Three how these conceptions and aspirations fared in the new social order that evolved following the economic revival of the early 1960s.