Tyrone House and the St George Family

Tyrone House and the St George Family
Author: Robert O’Byrne
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2017-08-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1543422209

Located on a prominent site overlooking Galway Bay in the west of Ireland, Tyrone House was once one of the country’s finest Georgian mansions. Dating from the 1770s, the building was home to generations of the French and St George families, a powerful symbol of their wealth and power. The interior of the house was lavishly decorated and furnished, beginning with the entrance hall, dominated by a life-size marble statue of Lord St George. But despite their advantages, over the course of the nineteenth century, the family went into irreversible decline and eventually forsook their great residence, which was destroyed by fire in 1920. This book tells the story of the rise and fall of the St Georges and their fate, embodied in what became of Tyrone House, which is today a little more than a gaunt ruin.

The Irish Aesthete: Ruins of Ireland

The Irish Aesthete: Ruins of Ireland
Author: Robert O'Byrne
Publisher: CICO Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-02-12
Genre: House & Home
ISBN: 9781782496861

Go on a journey with Robert O’Byrne as he brings fascinating Irish ruins to life. Fantastical, often whimsical, and frequently quirky, these atmospheric ruins are beautifully photographed and paired with fascinating text by Robert O’Byrne. Born out of Robert’s hugely popular blog, The Irish Aesthete, there are Medieval castles, Georgian mansions, Victorian lodges, and a myriad of other buildings, many never previously published. Robert focuses on a mixture of exteriors and interiors in varying stages of decay, on architectural details, and entire scenarios. Accompanying texts tell of the Regency siblings who squandered their entire fortune on gambling and carousing, of an Anglo-Norman heiress who pitched her husband out the window on their wedding night, and of the landlord who liked to walk around naked and whose wife made him carry a cowbell to warn housemaids of his approach. Arranged by the country’s four provinces, the diverse ruins featured offer a unique insight into Ireland and an exploration of her many styles of historic architecture.

The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House

The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House
Author: Vera Kreilkamp
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1998-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780815627524

This book is a comprehensive study of the ascendancy novel from Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (I800) through contemporary reinventions of the form. Kreilkamp argues that Irish fiction needs to be rescued from the critical assumptions underlying attacks on the historical mythologies of Yeats and the Literary Revival. Exploring the uniquely Irish dimensions of colonial and post-colonial societies, Kreilkamp charts the self-critical formulations of a gentry culture facing its extinction—more often and more successfully with comic irony than nostalgia. Kreilkamp positions the Big House novels within current debates in postcolonial criticism and theory. She argues that these fictional representations of a beleaguered society provide a complex, nuanced gaze into a hybrid colonial group that distanced itself from the self-aggrandizements of the revivalists. As she examines the gothic, revisionist, and postmodern permutations of an enduring national form, she illustrates the ways ascendancy women transformed conventions of an English domestic genre into political fiction. Her attention to Edgeworth's Irish works, the fiction of the neglected Victorian novelist Charles Lever, and the gothic forms of the Big House by Sheridan Le Fanu and Charles Maturin provide a historical context for later reformulations of the genre by Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, William Trevor, Jennifer Johnston, Aidan Higgins, and John Banville.

Openhearted

Openhearted
Author: Ann Ingle
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-09-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1844885720

SHORTLISTED FOR TWO IRISH BOOK AWARDS 2021 'Something they don't tell you about getting older is that you fall. Oh, you hear about it in passing, of course, "She had a fall, poor thing". Falling is not something you ever think about as a younger woman. You think about falling in love . . .' At 20 Londoner Ann Ingle fell madly in love with an Irish fellow she met on holiday in Cornwall. At the church to arrange their shotgun wedding she discovered that he hadn't even told her his real name. Sixty-odd years later Ann looks back on that first glorious fall and in a series of essays considers what she has learned from the life that followed - bringing eight children into the world, their father's years of mental illness and tragic death at 40, being a cash-strapped single mother in 1980s Dublin, coming into her own in her middle years - going to college, working and writing, and continuing to evolve and learn into her ninth decade, even as she accepts the realities of being 'old'. Candid about everything that matters - love, sex, heartbreak, money, class, religion, mental health, rearing children (and letting them go), reading and writing, ageing - Openhearted is a compelling story about living life in a spirit of curiosity and delight and with a willingness to look for good in others. ___________________ 'By some distance the most courageous, most poignant, most life-affirming memoir I've read in the last twenty years and more' Paul Howard 'Genuinely inspirational. I LOVE ANN INGLE' Marian Keyes 'What a beautiful openhearted, at times broken-hearted memoir ... honest, funny, searingly direct, a wonderful voice ... remarkable' Joe Duffy 'Really beautiful. Searingly honest, astonishingly frank and very, very funny' Maia Dunphy

Up in the Old Hotel

Up in the Old Hotel
Author: Joseph Mitchell
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 738
Release: 2015-07-15
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1101971304

Saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old “seafoodetarian” who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades. These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books—McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret—that are still renowned for their precise, respectful observation, their graveyard humor, and their offhand perfection of style. These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its odder citizens—as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.

Tears of a Tiger

Tears of a Tiger
Author: Sharon M. Draper
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 25
Release: 2013-07-23
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1442489138

The death of high school basketball star Rob Washington in an automobile accident affects the lives of his close friend Andy, who was driving the car, and many others in the school.

Romantic Irish Homes

Romantic Irish Homes
Author: Robert O'Byrne
Publisher: CICO Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-02-12
Genre: Interior decoration
ISBN: 9781908862907

Irish houses have a character and personality quite different from that found anywhere else. Quixotic, often whimsical and definitely quirky, they provide a sanctuary from the Irish climate, which is frequently gray, cold, and damp. No wonder, therefore, that over the centuries Ireland's domestic architecture and interior design have developed a distinctive personality in which color and vivacity are highly prized. Romantic Irish Homes presents 15 of the finest examples of these traits, each one of them distinctive and yet sharing the same native spirit. From vast ancient castles through sturdy Georgian manors to small farmhouses, the majority of them never previously photographed, the homes featured here offer a unique insight into the Irish temperament and an exploration of a style of decoration that, while adapted to meet 21st-century demands, still retains an historic integrity. Photographed by Simon Brown, Romantic Irish Homes is every bit as charming and memorable as the Irish people themselves.

Luggala Days

Luggala Days
Author: Robert O'Byrne
Publisher: CICO Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012-10-18
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781908170781

Explore the unique beauty of Ireland’s most fascinating house Hidden inside a secluded Irish valley lies Luggala, an exquisite eighteenth-century house at the centre of a 5,000-acre estate. In 1937 Ernest Guinness presented Luggala to his youngest daughter, Oonagh—one of the three famous “Golden Guinness Girls”—following her marriage to the fourth Baron Oranmore and Browne. Oonagh described Luggala as “the most decorative honey pot in Ireland” and made it the centre of a dazzling social world that included peers, painters and poets, journalists and junkies, scholars and socialites. In the late 1960s she passed the estate to her son, the Hon Garech Browne, founder of Claddagh Records, who has not only maintained but surpassed his mother’s gifts both for hospitality and for bringing together a wide range of creative talents. Luggala Days celebrates both the unique beauty of this place and the many celebrated names irresistibly drawn there, from writers like Brendan Behan, Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes, to actors and directors such as John Hurt, Daniel Day-Lewis, and John Boorman, and above all musicians, including The Chieftains, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, Bono, and Michael Jackson. All of them have succumbed to the enchantment of days passed at Luggala.

The Last Knight

The Last Knight
Author: Robert O'Byrne
Publisher:
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2013-10-15
Genre: Art historians
ISBN: 9781843514084

When Desmond FitzGerald died in September 2011, obituaries paid tribute to his involvement with organizations such as the Irish Georgian Society and the Irish Architectural Archive. But over the previous decades, Desmond had achieved much more than has yet been realized. Not only did he battle to save his own ancestral home, Glin Castle, from destitution but he also helped to ensure the survival of many other historic houses in Ireland, raising large sums of money at home and overseas for this cause. Without his passion and commitment Ireland's architectural and artistic heritage today would be much the poorer. 'The Last Knight' is a celebration of the enormous amount that Desmond managed to do before his death, but it is also an assessment of the man.