Ireland Travel Quotes

It is a long way to Ireland, Janet, and I am sorry to send my little friend on such weary travels: but if I can't do better, how is it to be helped? Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?" I could risk no sort of answer by this time: my heart was still. "Because, he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you - especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land some broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, - you'd forget me.

And I assure you, I am perfectly sane now. Stable as a workhorse in old Ireland, my friends, with only one goal in life. To do good. Always good.  

When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man.

They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, desserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.

Every time a traveler goes to Ireland and doesn’t stop at the Cliffs of Moher, a banshee loses her voice.

We had found nothing, and had been lost several times already in one morning, so this was shaping up into a top travel experience.

On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound. Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses. You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon. There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind. The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values. For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds to heavy human problems of the world. My body requires no attention. It's not hungry. It's neither warm or cold. It's resigned to being left undisturbed. Why have I troubled to bring it here? I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while the weightless element that has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the planet. This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels. It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which circumstances I've gone through make possible. Then what am I – the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation? There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light. While my hand is on the stick, my feet on the rudder, and my eyes on the compass, this consciousness, like a winged messenger, goes out to visit the waves below, testing the warmth of water, the speed of wind, the thickness of intervening clouds. It goes north to the glacial coasts of Greenland, over the horizon to the edge of dawn, ahead to Ireland, England, and the continent of Europe, away through space to the moon and stars, always returning, unwillingly, to the mortal duty of seeing that the limbs and muscles have attended their routine while it was gone.

When they had finished they made me take notes of whatever conversation they had quoted, so that I might have the exact words, and got up to go, and when I asked them where they were going and what they were doing and by what names I should call them, they would tell me nothing, except that they had been commanded to travel over Ireland continually, and upon foot and at night, that they might live close to the stones and the trees and at the hours when the immortals are awake.

Submitted for your approval--the curious case of Colleen O’Brien and the gorgeous time traveling Scot who landed in her living room.” – Rod Serling

The politicians in Ireland speak Gaelic the way the Real Housewives of Orange County speak French.

I grew up back and forth between the British Isles: England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales. I spent short periods of time in France, Italy, and South Africa. This is my first time in the States. I was disappointed by Atlanta at first — I'd wanted to live in New York-but it's grown on me.” Everything about Kaidan was exciting and exotic. This was my first time traveling away from home, and he'd already seen so much. I ate my apple, glad it was crisp and not soft. “Which was your favorite place?” I asked. “I've never been terribly attached to any place. I guess it would have to be...here.” I stopped midchew and examined his face. He wouldn't look at me. He was clenching his jaw, tense. Was he serious or was he teasing me? I swallowed my bite. “The Texas panhandle?” I asked. “No.” He seemed to choose each word with deliberate care. “I mean here in this car. With you.” Covered in goose bumps, I looked away from him and stared straight ahead at the road, letting my hand with the apple fall to my lap. He cleared his throat and tried to explain. “I've not talked like this with anyone, not since I started working, not even to the only four people in the world who I call friends. You have Patti, and even that boyfriend of yours. So this has been a relief of sort. Kind of...nice.” He cleared his throat again. Oh, my gosh. Did we just have a moment? I proceeded with caution, hoping not to ruin it. “It's been nice for me, too,” I said. “I've never told Jay anything. He has no idea. You're the only one I've talked to about it all, except Patti, but it's not the same. She learned the basics from the nun at the convent where I was born.” “You were born in a convent,” he stated. “Yes.” “Naturally.

I made my first home there and had been happy, because to be alienated in one's own country, in one's own hometown, among one's kin and peers, was problematic, but nothing could be more natural than to be alienated in a foreign country, and so there I had at last naturalized my estrangement. This may be one of the underappreciated pleasures of travel: of being at last legitimately lost and confused.

We ain't supposed to carry firearms when traveling into town but I'm always ready for someone to try and take a bite outta me, especially at the university. Everyone knows that academics are the most ruthless cutthroats around.

...being a weatherman in Ireland is about the biggest scam going.

If Continental tea is like a faded yellow telegraph form, in these islands to the west of Ostend it has the dark, glimmering tones of Russian icons, before the milk gives it a color similar to the complexion of an overfed baby; on the Continent weak tea is served in fragile porcelain, here it is casually poured into thick earthenware cups from battered metal teapots, a heavenly brew to restore the traveler, dirt cheap too.

Now then, Mr. Crab," said the zebra, "here are the people I told you about; and they know more than you do, who live in a pool, and more than I do, who live in a forest. For they have been travelers all over the world, and know every part of it." "There's more of the world than Oz," declared the crab, in a stubborn voice. "That is true," said Dorothy; "but I used to live in Kansas, in the United States, and I've been to California and to Australia--and so has Uncle Henry." "For my part," added the Shaggy Man, "I've been to Mexico and Boston and many other foreign countries." "And I," said the Wizard, "have been to Europe and Ireland." "So you see," continued the zebra, addressing the crab, "here are people of real consequence, who know what they are talking about.

As a former pilot in World War I, Walter had always preferred flying as a means of travel, rather than going by sea. Whenever he was in the Dakota, flying over to Northern Ireland, he always asked for the front seat, joking that if it crashed then he wanted to die first.

I’d often wondered, absorbed in piles of research, if the magic of history would be lost if we could go back and live it. Did we varnish the past and make heroes of average men and imagine beauty and valor where there was only dirge and desperation? Or like the old man looking back on his youth, remembering only the things he’d seen, did the angle of our gaze sometimes cause us to miss the bigger picture? I didn’t think time offered clarity so much as time stripped away the emotion that colored memories. The Irish Civil War had happened eighty years before I’d traveled to Ireland. Not so far that the people had forgotten it, but enough time had passed that more—or maybe less—cynical eyes could pull the details apart and look at them for what they were.

Charles Lindbergh’s achievement in finding his way alone from Long Island to an airfield outside Paris deserves a moment’s consideration. Maintaining your bearings by means of dead reckoning means taking close note of compass headings, speed of travel, time elapsed since the last calculation, and any deviations from the prescribed route induced by drifting. Some measure of the difficulty is shown by the fact that the Byrd expedition the following month—despite having a dedicated navigator and radio operator, as well as pilot and copilot—missed their expected landfall by two hundred miles, were often only vaguely aware of where they were, and mistook a lighthouse on the Normandy coast for the lights of Paris. Lindbergh by contrast hit all his targets exactly—Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, Cap de la Hague in France, Le Bourget in Paris—and did so while making the calculations on his lap while flying an unstable plane.

If Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel could have existed in reality, it would have been something like the Long Room of Trinity College.

I will go outside, wander about aimlessly, and see what happens.

The best thing about flying first class....was that you could be as nutty as a fruitcake and were still treated like the Queen of Sheba.

I suppose if you’ve always been wrapped in wool, you don’t know it’s wool.

TWO THINGS STRIKE every Irish person when he comes to America, Irish friends tell me: the vastness of the country, and the seemingly endless desire of its people to talk about their personal problems. Two things strike an American when he comes to Ireland: how small it is, and how tight-lipped. An Irish person with a personal problem takes it into a hole with him, like a squirrel with a nut before winter. He tortures himself and sometimes his loved ones, too. What he doesn’t do, if he has suffered some reversal, is vent about it to the outside world. The famous Irish gift of gab is a cover for all the things they aren’t telling you.

I still don't know why we didn't hire a car to get around Ireland." "When I was a kid, I always dreamed about living in Ireland. I used to pretend I was one of the traveling people, driving my gypsy wagon from village to village. Used to picture a dark gypsy kidnapping me and having his way with me. Exciting stuff." Katy grinned at her. "Could still happen, you know." "Katy, we have a horse that's so laid-back I have to keep checking to see if he's dead.

Unemployed people will use any number of excuses including discrimination for reasons such as disability, race, sexual orientation, religion, sex or age, or maybe there’s a shortage of jobs in their area. Well if that’s the case then they can travel to wherever the work is and go into digs. I work in construction management and regularly work with steel erectors from Ireland or Newcastle, electricians from Cardiff, fixers from Sheffield or Birmingham, steel fixers from Romania, carpenters from Poland, canteen girls from Romania, scaffolders from Lithuania, and concrete gangs of Indians, and they all travel wherever the work is and they all live in digs. We all do. It’s the nature of our industry.

Film and TV V.I.P, seeker of the peace, part time chandelier cleaner, a legend in his own time, oppressor of champions, soldier of fortune, world traveller, bonvivant, all round good guy, international lover, casual hero, philosopher, wars fought, bears wrestled, equations solved, virgins enlightened, revolutions quelled, tigers castrated, orgies organised, bars quaffed dry, governments run, test rockets flown, life president of the Liquidarian Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

Cara sipped her juice and then said, "Talking about de-stressing oneself..." She laughed softly. "You've got to see the River Dancing Festival tonight at the park. It's great entertainment. They might even teach you how to River Dance. Sometimes they do that.:

It’s a little more, but not much. And, you get conversation, which is something to be savored in Ireland. If you’ve got any kind of a heart, a soul, an appreciation for your fellow man, or any kind of appreciation for the written word, or simply a love of a perfectly poured beverage, then there’s no way you could avoid loving this city.

What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they’d ever seen this little man,” says McCarthy. “And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That’s when everyone panicked.

Immediately across the road is a ruined abbey and cemetery. As I haven't visited one since late yesterday afternoon, I decide to take a look. On the whole, it's fair to say that, if you're travelling round the west of Ireland, an interest in ruined abbeys, however slight, will stand you in better stead than a passion for rollerblading, say or a penchant for showbiz gossip.

I don’t seem to have said enough about the compensating or positive element of exposure to travel. Just as you discover that stupidity and cruelty are the same everywhere, you find that the essential elements of humanism are the same everywhere, too. Punjabis in Amritsar and Lahore are equally welcoming and open-minded, even though partition means the amputation of Punjab as well as of the subcontinent. There are a heartening number of atheists and agnostics in the six counties of Northern Ireland, even though Ulster as well as Ireland has been divided. Most important of all, the instinct for justice and for liberty is just as much “innate” in us as are the promptings of tribalism and sexual xenophobia and superstition. People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains; every time a Bastille falls one is always pleasantly surprised by how many sane and decent people were there all along. There’s an old argument about whether full bellies or empty bellies lead to contentment or revolt: it’s an argument not worth having. The crucial organ is the mind, not the gut. People assert themselves out of an unquenchable sense of dignity.

By the way, I do enjoy fairytale endings, in case you misunderstood me." He glanced at her and smiled. "I like it when good wins over evil... when the knight defeats the dragon and saves the fair maiden... and when the woodsman saves Little Red Riding Hood. I like it when they say, 'And they lived happily ever after'... Just because I'm a man doesn't mean that I don't have a romantic bone in my body." Rick gave a curt nod. "Men can be romantic, too.

Until recently it has been assumed that in similar cases in the Scandinavian homelands, exotic and imported artefacts buried with women were gifts from men. This is especially so in western Norway, where artefacts looted from Britain and Ireland have mostly been found in women’s graves. But the new isotopic and genetic evidence on migration has forced us to rethink the interpretation of these burials. The recurring problem is trying to work out whether it was the object or its owner who travelled. When it comes to women in the Viking Age, the conclusion has almost always been the former, which has had an enormous impact on how we have viewed women’s agency – their involvement and individual participation – in the entire period. Partly the issue is that the interpretation of the objects has been based on a number of assumptions that lead to circular arguments, a serpent biting its own tail, going right the way back to the start of the Viking Age.

Music and dance. What I have written must surely suggest a people cursed by Heaven,... No people on earth, I am persuaded, loves music so well, nor dance, nor oratory, though the music falls strangely on my ears... More than once I have been at Mr. Treacy's when at close of dinner, some traveling harper would be called in, blind as often as not, his fingernails kept long and the mysteries of his art hidden in their horny ridges. The music would come to us with the sadness of a lost world, each note a messenger sent wandering among the Waterford goblets. Riding home late at night, past tavern or alehouse, I would hear harps and violins, thudding feet rising to a frenzy. I have seen them dancing at evening on fairdays, in meadows decreed by custom for such purposes, their bodies swift-moving, and their faces impassive but bright-eyed, intent. I have watched them in silence, reins held loosely in my hand, and have marveled at the stillness of my own body, my shoulders rigid and heavy.

Henry Fielding, a highly successful satiric dramatist until the introduction of censorship in 1737, began his novel-writing career with Shamela, a pastiche of Pamela, which humorously attacked the hypocritical morality which that novel displayed. Joseph Andrews (1742) was also intended as a kind of parody of Richardson; but Fielding found that his novels were taking on a moral life of their own, and he developed his own highly personal narrative style - humorous and ironic, with an omniscient narrative presence controlling the lives and destinies of his characters. Fielding focuses more on male characters and manners than Richardson. In doing so, he creates a new kind of hero in his novels. Joseph Andrews is chaste, while Tom Jones in Tom Jones (1749) is quite the opposite. Tom is the model of the young foundling enjoying his freedom (to travel, to have relationships with women, to enjoy sensual experience) until his true origins are discovered. When he matures, he assumes his social responsibilities and marries the woman he has 'always' loved, who has, of course, like a mediaeval crusader's beloved, been waiting faithfully for him. Both of these heroes are types, representatives of their sex. There is a picaresque journey from innocence to experience, from freedom to responsibility. It is a rewriting of male roles to suit the society of the time. The hero no longer makes a crusade to the Holy Land, but the crusade is a personal one, with chivalry learned on the way, and adventure replacing self-sacrifice and battle.

Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was buy Ireland. From each other. An Irish economist named Morgan Kelly, whose estimates of Irish bank losses have been the most prescient, has made a back-of-the-envelope calculation that puts the property-related losses of all Irish banks at roughly 106 billion euros. (Think $10.6 trillion.) At the rate money flows into the Irish treasury, Irish bank losses alone would absorb every penny of Irish taxes for the next four years.

I never met a librarian worth his or her salt who didn't perceive my passion for books. And without exception, each one would lend me a book on a subject we had been discussing. No paperwork, no formalities of any kind, no rules or regulations. My unspoken side of the bargain was to protect them, in two ways; first by keeping the book unharmed - not that easy, especially in bad weather, but when it rained, I carried the book next to my skin. I can tell you now that carrying Gulliver's Travels or Lays of Ancient Rome or Mr. Oscar Wilde's stories or Mr. William Yeat's poems next to my heart gave me a kind of sweet pleasure. The second half of the bargain often nearly broke my heart, but I always kept it - and that was to return the book safe and sound to the library that had lent it. To part company with Mr. Charles Dickens or Mr. William Makepeace Thackeray and his lovely name! - that was harder than saying good-bye to a dear flesh-and-blood companion. But I always did it - and I sent the book by registered post, no small consideration of cost given the peculiar economics of an itinerant storyteller.

One of the first books of travel, giving European readers some insight into the unfamiliar world of the Orient, was published in 1356-67 in Anglo-Norman French. Called simply Travels, it was said to be by Sir John Mandeville, but a French historian, Jean d'Outremeuse, may well have written the book. It is a highly entertaining guide for pilgrims to the Holy Land, but goes beyond, taking the reader as far as Tartary, Persia, India and Egypt, recounting more fantasy than fact, but containing geographical details to give the work credence. Mandeville's book whetted the Western European reader's appetite for the travel book as a journal of marvels: dry scientific detail was not what these readers wanted. Rather it was imagination plus information. Thus, myths of 'the fountain of youth' and of gold-dust lying around 'like ant-hills' caught the Western imagination, and, when the voyagers of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries found 'new worlds' in the Americas, these myths were enlarged and expanded, as Eldorado joined the Golden Road to Samarkand in the imagination of readers concerning distant lands.

I painlessly came to realize that the reverence I felt for the holiness of life is not ever likely to be entirely at home in organized religion. It was later, when I was able to travel farther , that the presence of holiness and mystery seemed, as far as my vision was able to see, to descend into the windows of Chartres, the stone peasant figures of Autun, the tall sheets of gold on the walls of Torcello that reflected the light of the sea; in the frescoes of Piero, of Giotto; in the shell of a church wall in Ireland still standing on a floor of sheep-cropped grass with no ceiling other than he changing sky.

Are you still working on that bucket list of yours?" Amelia nodded. "As I remember, you mentioned a few things for Ireland." He smiled with humor lacing his eyes as he said, "Like kissing the Blarney Stone at Blarney Castle." She laughed as she opened her brochure of things to do in southern Ireland. "You've got a good memory." Amelia pointed to a picture of a beautiful garden full of flowers. "I want to visit the Blarney Gardens, too." He pointed to another picture and said, "How about the Blarney dungeons? That looks awesome to explore." She looked up at him and smiled. "Yeah. I've also been interested in listening to a live Irish concert.

This is what we call a shamrock. It has three leaves. Do you know what it represents?" "Luck? Amelia answered. Lee smiled. "That's what everyone says." Rick shrugged. "Well, I know it's Ireland's emblem." Lee shook his head and said earnestly, "It's much more than that. It represents our religion... who we are. When St. Patrick was trying to teach Christianity here in Ireland, he used this shamrock as an example." Lee pointed to each leaf and said, "This is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost...." Rick still held the clover in his hand. He looked at it and twirled it between his fingers as he said, "I'm calling this the Shamrock Case from now on. I love what it represents.

SHAKESPEARE What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more (Hamlet) There is no one kind of Shakespearean hero, although in many ways Hamlet is the epitome of the Renaissance tragic hero, who reaches his perfection only to die. In Shakespeare's early plays, his heroes are mainly historical figures, kings of England, as he traces some of the historical background to the nation's glory. But character and motive are more vital to his work than praise for the dynasty, and Shakespeare's range expands considerably during the 1590s, as he and his company became the stars of London theatre. Although he never went to university, as Marlowe and Kyd had done, Shakespeare had a wider range of reference and allusion, theme and content than any of his contemporaries. His plays, written for performance rather than publication, were not only highly successful as entertainment, they were also at the cutting edge of the debate on a great many of the moral and philosophical issues of the time. Shakespeare's earliest concern was with kingship and history, with how 'this sceptr'd isle' came to its present glory. As his career progressed, the horizons of the world widened, and his explorations encompassed the geography of the human soul, just as the voyages of such travellers as Richard Hakluyt, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir Francis Drake expanded the horizons of the real world.

Glasgow is more than body and more than head; She is both head and body. Her air of independent and self-contained metropolitanism - different from, and balancing, that of London - is the first thing that strikes the stranger who visits her after seeing the English provincial cities. And though most of the human elements of this metropolitanism [have been drawn from all Scotland, from Ireland, from England, and even from the Continent and Judaea, Glasgow is vitally self supporting to a greater extent than any other very large city; and while, by means of trade, travel, and intellectual sympathy, the sphere of her civic interests is in actuality the whole world, in immediate appearance it is frontiered by the city's wide boundaries.

When Mrs. Darling came into the kitchen it was with a tentative step and furtive looks. "How is your little pet?" she eventually asked. "What? Oh, he's absolutely adorable," Wendy said, remembering to toss Snowball a tidbit of mutton. For Nana she reserved the bone. "You can... take him with you, you know. To Ireland. He would be a delightful little travel companion." For a moment, just a moment, Wendy looked at her mother- really looked at her, steadily and clearly. "You would never send the boys away." The statement fell hard and final and full of more meaning than anything that had ever been said in the kitchen before. "But they didn't write the... fantasies...." her mother said quietly. Then Mr. Darling came in, loud and blustery, talking up Irish butter and clean country air. Mother and daughter both ignored him.

It seems that unlike the continuous, enduring contentment that we anticipate, our actual happiness with, and in, a place must be a brief and, at least to the conscious mind, apparently haphazard phenomenon: an interval in which we achieve receptivity to the world around us, in which positive thoughts of past and future coagulate and anxieties are allayed. The condition rarely endures for longer than ten minutes. New patterns of anxiety inevitably form on the horizon of consciousness, like the weather fronts that mass themselves every few days off the western coasts of Ireland. The past victory ceases to seem so impressive, the future acquires complications and the beautiful view becomes as invisible as anything which is always around. I was to discover an unexpected continuity between the melancholic self I had been at home and the person I was to be on the island, a continuity quite at odds with the radical discontinuity in the landscape and climate, where the very air seemed to be made of a different and sweeter substance.

By his early-twenties, John F. Kennedy was living one of the most extraordinary young American lives of the twentieth century. He traveled in an orbit of unprecedented wealth, influence, global mobility, and power. As a student and as diplomatic assistant to his father, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1938 to 1940, Kennedy journeyed to England, Ireland, France, Moscow, Berlin, Beirut, Damascus, Athens, and Turkey, pausing briefly from a vacation on the French Riviera to sleep with the actress Marlene Dietrich. He met with top White House officials and traveled to Cuba, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Peru, and Ecuador. He gambled in a casino in Monte Carlo; visited Naples, Capri, Milan, Florence, Venice, and Rome; rode a camel at the Great Pyramid at Giza; attended the coronation of Pope Pius XII; and witnessed a rally for Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. He recalled of these momentous years, 'It was a great opportunity to see a period of history which was one of the most significant.' In a visit to British-occupied Palestine, Kennedy recalled, 'I saw the rock where our Lord ascended into heaven in a cloud, and [in] the same area, I saw the place where Mohammed was carried up to heaven on a white horse.

The choice of 'eastern Europe' as a frame of reference requires a word of explanation. The term is used here in a provisional manner and indeed a rather arbitrary one, with the lower-case form intended to underline this. The travellers set out from places that stretch from Kiev to Rijeka, and from Gdansk to Crete. The eastern Europe that they represent includes the lands that lie between the Baltic in the north and the Mediterranean in the south; between Russia in the east and Italy, Austria and Germany in the west. These boundaries were set in part by the limits of the possible: had resources permitted, accounts by travellers from the Baltic countries or by Austrian Germans, among others, might equally well have been included here. My aim has been to assemble a representative selection of travel writings from this region: the anthology includes accounts from some twenty languages, by more than one hundred authors, written over a period of more than 450 years, beginning in the sixteenth century and finishing with a book published in 2004. The writers travel to Ireland in the west, to Istanbul in the east—and any number of places in between. But why group these particular east European travels through Europe together, in a single volume? The answer lies partly in eastern Europe's relationship to the idea of Europe itself.

It was simple: we are the storytellers. Imagination in Ireland was beyond the beyond. It was out there. It was Far Out before far out was invented in California, because sitting around in a few centuries of rain breeds these outlands of imagination. As evidence, think of Abraham Stoker, confined to bed until he was eight years old, lying there breathing damp Dublin air with no TV or radio but the heaving wheeze of his chest acting as pretty constant reminder that soon he was heading Elsewhere. Even after he was married to Florence Balcombe of Marino Crescent (she who had an unrivalled talent for choosing the wrong man, who had already given up Oscar Wilde as a lost cause in the Love Department when she met this Bram Stoker and thought: he seems sweet), even after Bram moved to London he couldn’t escape his big dark imaginings in Dublin and one day further down the river he spawned Dracula (Book 123, Norton, New York). Jonathan Swift was only settling into a Chesterfield couch in Dublin when his brain began sailing to Lilliput and Blefuscu (Book 778, Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, Penguin, London). Another couple of deluges and he went further, he went to Brobdingnag, Laputa, Bainbarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg and . . . Japan, before he went furthest of all, to Houyhnhnms. Read Gulliver’s Travels when you’re sick in bed and you’ll be away. I’m telling you. You’ll be transported, and even as you’re being carried along in the current you’ll think no writer ever went this Far. Something like this could only be dreamt up in Ireland. Charles Dickens recognised that.

Although they made it their own, the Vikings were not the first explorers of the North Atlantic. For at least two centuries before the beginning of the Viking Age, Irish monks had been setting out in their curachs in search of remote islands where they could contemplate the divine in perfect solitude, disturbed only by the cries of seabirds and the crashing of the waves on the shore. The monks developed a tradition of writing imrama, travel tales, the most famous of which is the Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis (The Voyage of St Brendan the Abbot). The Navigatio recounts a voyage purported to have been made by St Brendan (d. c. 577) in search of the mythical Isles of the Blessed, which were believed to lie somewhere in the western ocean. The imrama certainly show a familiarity with the North Atlantic–the Navigatio, for example, describes what are probably icebergs, volcanoes and whales–but they also include so many fantastical and mythological elements that it is impossible to disentangle truth from invention. There is no evidence to support claims that are often made that St Brendan discovered America before the Vikings, but Irish monks certainly did reach the Faeroe Islands and Iceland before them. Ash from peat fires containing charred barley grains found in windblown sand deposits at Á Sondum on Sandoy in the southern Faeroes has been radiocarbon-dated to between the fourth and sixth centuries AD. Although no trace of buildings has yet been found, the ash probably came from domestic hearths and had been thrown out onto the sand to help control erosion, which was a common practice at the time. As peat was not used as a fuel in Scandinavia at this time but was widely used in Britain and Ireland, this evidence suggests that seafaring Irish monks had discovered the Faeroes not long after Ireland’s conversion to Christianity. No physical traces of an Irish presence in Iceland have been found in modern times, but early Viking settlers claimed that they found croziers and other ecclesiastical artefacts there. There are also two papar place-names (see here) associated with Irish monks, Papos and Papey, in the east of Iceland. The monks, all being celibate males, did not found any permanent self-sustaining communities in either place: they were always visitors rather than settlers.

The original is displayed in a special darkened shrine now called the Treasury, at the eastern end of the library at Trinity College in Dublin, and over 520,000 visitors queue to see it every year, buying colored and numbered admission tickets to the Book of Kells exhibition. More than 10,000,000 people filed past the glass cases in the first two decades after the opening of the present display in 1992. The daily line of visitors waiting to witness a mere Latin manuscript are almost incredible. There are signposts to the 'Book of Kells' across Dublin. The new tram stop outside the gates of Trinity College is named after the manuscript. No other medieval manuscript is such a household name, even if people are not always sure what it is.

busy with people getting off the boat, is it? It’s all one-way.’ Bee reached up to take the glass of whiskey Paddy was holding out to her. ‘I’ll be back,’ she said, but in her mind she was asking herself when. Captain Bob had secured a job as a captain, meeting the cargo ships and piloting them down the Mersey into the port of Liverpool, from where they had waited, out on the bar. He had already travelled to Liverpool and found them a house close to the docks. ‘It has a kitchen,’ he’d said to Bee. ‘The range is still there, but it was damaged in the war, and there’s a new gas cooker fitted next to it.’ Bee’s mouth had dropped. ‘A gas cooker? I have no idea how to use one of those. I’ll be sticking to the fire.’ Bob had just smiled at her indulgently. He understood why the traffic from Dublin was one-way. Bee would soon discover how quickly women who left the west coast of Ireland adapted from the life their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years to all the mod cons England and America had to offer. ‘Mammy!’ Ciaran shouted from the door. Bob and Bee swivelled round in their chairs as Ciaran came in, followed by Michael, who was carrying Finnbar in his arms and had Mary Kate at his side, holding his hand. ‘God love you, come here,’ said Bee to Mary Kate, who ran over to her and allowed her to pull her up onto her knee. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’ Captain Bob and Michael exchanged

Wherever you go in the world, there will be people to tell you it'll be bigger, stranger, better, more authentic if you take the time to go somewhere else instead; but if you are there, you won't be here. You can only be at one place at a time, and sleep in one bed each night. Sometimes it's good to know where you are when you wake up.

I find that romance is for readers. I want adventures; they are for the living.

So what’s the story your grandpa told you?” I leaned back against the blanket, propping my head in one hand and looking up at him. “It wasn’t about the pond, I guess. It’s more about the town. I didn’t ever come to Mona when I lived here. I never had reason to - so when I asked my grandpa if there were any good fishing spots around here, and he mentioned this pond, I asked him about the town. He said Burl Ives, the singer, was once thrown in jail here in Mona. It was before his time, but he thought it was a funny story.” “I’ve never heard about that!” “It was the 1940’s, and Burl Ives traveled around singing. I guess the authorities didn’t like one of his songs - they thought it was bawdy, so they put him in jail.” “What was the song?” I snickered. “It was called Foggy, Foggy Dew. My grandpa sang it for me.” “Let’s hear it!” I challenged. “It’s far too lewd.” Samuel pulled his mouth into a serious frown, but his eyes twinkled sardonically. “All right you’ve convinced me,” he said without me begging at all, and we laughed together. He cleared his throat and began to sing, with a touch of an Irish lilt, about a bachelor living all alone whose only sin had been to try to protect a fair young maiden from the foggy, foggy dew. One night she came to my bedside When I was fast asleep. She laid her head upon my bed And she began to weep She sighed, she cried, she damn near died She said what shall I do? So I hauled her into bed and covered up her head Just to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew. “Oh my!” I laughed, covering my mouth. “I don’t think I would have stuck Burl Ives in jail for that, but it is pretty funny,” “Marine’s are the lewdest, crudest, foulest talking bunch you’ll ever find. I’ve heard much, much worse. I’ve sung much, much worse. I tried to remain chaste and virtuous, and I still have the nickname Preacher after all these years - but I have been somewhat corrupted.” He waggled his eyebrows at his ribaldry. “I kind of liked that song…” I mused, half kidding. “Sing something else but without the Irish.” “Without the Irish? That’s the best part.” Samuel smiled crookedly. “I had a member of my platoon whose mom was born and raised in Ireland. This guy could do an authentic Irish accent, and man, could he sing. When he sang Danny Boy everybody cried. All these tough, lethal Marines, bawling like babies

My eyes are sort of greenish,” I say through a nervous laugh. “Am I that scary?” He looks at me and we both slow to a stop. A Vespa shoots past, swirling our hair in the wind. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t blink, so I don’t either. I get the impression he’s trying to subliminally relay his answer to me. That I’m supposed to know what he’s thinking. I don’t. Suddenly he brushes my hair off my shoulder before continuing up the street. “I mostly grew up in New Mexico,” he says. “Arizona and Nevada too, with brief stints in Italy, Ireland, and a few countries in South America. Now we’re in Texas.” “Oh.” That sounds very, very, very far away from home. “My parents both work at Texas A&M. So that’s where Tate and Nina go, and where I’ll start in the fall.” “And you’re studying the same thing, following in their footsteps,” I say. “Do you want to be a professor too?” He shrugs. “Maybe one day. I’d like to travel more first though, work on dig sites in places like Greece or Central America. Ancient civilizations are buried everywhere. It’s, like, no matter where you walk, you never know what could be under your feet. I want a job that lets me see all the things I want to see before I get stuck behind a desk.” “I know what you mean. I can’t wait to see the world and document it, photojournalist style.” An image of the two of us traveling together pops into my mind: him digging up the world and me taking pictures of it. I squash those butterflies too.

Is Your Past Really Your Past At All?

An English traveler, James H. Juke, was aghast that a day’s sail could take him from a well-fed nation to an island of the wretched and dying. He saw Irish trying to exist on sand eels, turnip tops and seaweed—“a diet which no one in England would consider fit for the meanest animal which he kept.” The potato blight had not spared England, nor Holland, parts of France and Germany. Their crops also failed. But only in Ireland were people dying en masse. The cause had been planted in the land—not the potato, but English rule that had driven a majority of Irish from ground their ancestors had owned. “The terrifying exactitude of memory,” in Tocqueville’s phrase. Famines had come before, epochs of hunger that killed upwards of 70,000 in the worst case. But this starvation reached across the island—it was now the Great Hunger, an Gorta Mór, with a fatal toll ten times that of the Great Plague of London in 1665. And here was the tragedy: there was plenty of food in Ireland while the people starved. Irish rains produced a prodigious amount of Irish grains. Almost three fourths of the country’s cultivable land was in corn, wheat, oats and barley. The food came from Irish land and Irish labor. But it didn’t go into Irish mouths. About 1.5 billion pounds of grain and other foodstuffs were exported. The natives were hired hands and witnesses to these money crops, grown by Anglo landlords. Same with cattle, sheep and hogs raised within eyesight of the hollow-bellied. Famine-ravaged Ireland exported more beef than any other part of the British Empire.

My Éireann by Stewart Stafford Éireann is my maiden, Titian grace spun gold, Fêted for her fairness, A goddess sacrificed. All-seeing eye of piety, But mauled with scars, In repose and melding, With the ire of the land. In perennial motion, Rivers meet the sea, Gaze upon a dark pool, Soubrette for new suitors. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

Kaelyn Sexton works as a Certified Nurse Midwife at Catawba Women's Center in Hickory, NC, and has a doctorate, a master's degree, and two B.S. degrees in nursing-related fields. Kaelyn Sexton's surname has Irish origins, and she has traveled to Dublin, Ireland, where she explored her Irish heritage.

To address such concerns, major breweries had started hiring “travellers,” men who would literally travel to places where the product was being sold to check on the quality. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, Guinness had employed several such men, including J. C. Haines, himself a former brewer, who traveled the London region for Guinness in the 1890s. Haines also became a Guinness “World Traveller,” making trips to Europe and the Middle East, as well as to Australia. Perhaps the most famous Guinness World Traveller was Arthur T. Shand, a former World Traveller for British ale brewer Allsopp, who was hired by Guinness in 1898. For the next 15 years, until the eve of World War I, the tireless Shand traveled throughout the United States and Canada, and also made visits to Latin America, South Africa, and Australia, which was the largest market for Foreign Extra Stout until eclipsed by the United States in 1910.

The flat world concept was just one more heinous fiction manufactured by those with so much to lose should the world be traversed so soon after the fall of Ireland’s ancient culture. Lifting the ban on travel and commerce to the West one thousand years later proved less hazardous to their schemes since by then most of the world was under the dominion of Rome. Only myths and legends preserved the facts and speak of mysterious and magical lands of the West. Only the bards, minstrels, and their descendants dared recount, in veiled language, the perilous truth.

With Martyn, I hold forth some of the philosophies I've been honing since beginning my travels in Ireland almost two years ago, about universal health care and the travel practices of American youth, about my country and the way I was indoctrinated to believe that America was number one in everything, but actually people in other countries have what we have--and sometimes better--about my obligations as a daughter, about the ways that I have put my faith in all the wrong things and now I am hopelessly lost but at the same time realizing that's okay so maybe that means I'm not lost at all, just searching.

Other eurozone nations—Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus—also needed bailouts, but German disdain was mostly reserved for Greece. That was not only because Greece needed more money than all those other countries combined, but because most of the other governments got into financial problems after having to bail out their irresponsible banks. In Greece, the banks were doing fine until the government got into financial trouble on account of its own considerable failings. Germans judged the excesses of politicians and citizens more harshly than those of banks and consumers, and saw the Greek government’s negligence as a betrayal of the European project itself.

The seven-plus centuries of organized torment originated in a letter from Pope Adrian IV in 1155, which empowered King Henry II to conquer Ireland and its “rude and savage people.” It was decreed that the rogue Irish Catholic Church, a mutt’s mash of Celtic, Druidic, Viking and Gaelic influences, had strayed too far from clerical authority, at a time when English monarchs still obeyed Rome. Legend alone was not enough to save it—that is, the legend of Patrick, a Roman citizen who came to Ireland in a fifth-century slave ship and then convinced many a Celt to worship a Jewish carpenter’s son. Patrick traveled with his own brewer; the saint’s ale may have been a more persuasive selling point for Christianity than the trinity symbol of the shamrock. There followed centuries of relative peace, the island a hive of learned monks, masterly stonemasons and tillers of the soil, while Europe fell to Teutonic plunder. The Vikings, after much pillaging, forced interbreeding, tower-toppling and occasional acts of civic improvement (they founded Dublin on the south bank of the Liffey), eventually succumbed to the island’s religion as well. They produced children who were red-haired and freckled, the Norse-Celts. But by the twelfth century, Ireland was out of line. Does it matter that this Adrian IV, the former Nicholas Breakspear, was history’s only English pope? Or that the language of the original papal bull, with all its authoritative aspersions on the character of the Irish, has never been authenticated? It did for 752 years.

Oisin had been carried away to the Land of Youth, under the western ocean. Both of them return to their mortal existence, and to Ireland, when Patrick is in the land, winning it from Crom Cruach to Christ. Patrick meets and converts each of them. They attach themselves to his company, and travel Ireland with him. When the Saint is wearied from much travelling and work, or, as often happens, from the perversity of the people he has to deal with, Oisin or Caoilte refresh and beguile him with many a sweet tale of the Fian — all of which, says the tradition, the pleased Patrick had his scribe Breogan write down and preserve for posterity. These tales make the Agallam na Seanorach. The

Typhus appeared in the winter of 1846. The Irish called it the black fever because it made victims’ faces swollen and dark. It was incredibly contagious, spread by lice, which were everywhere. Many people lived in one-room cottages, humans and animals all huddled together, and there was no way to avoid lice jumping from person to person. The typhus bacteria also traveled in louse feces, which formed an invisible dust in the air. Anyone who touched an infected person, or even an infected person’s clothes, could become the disease’s next victim. Typhus was the supreme killer of the famine; in the winter of 1847, thousands of people died of it every week. Another

In the mid-nineteenth century, Jeremiah Curtin, an Irish-American who had learned Irish, traveled throughout the Irish-speaking enclaves in Connacht and discovered hundreds of previously unrecorded stories. He recorded them in their original language and greatly advanced the study of Irish folklore.

She was not at the concert any more. She looked around the rustic room, blinking. What the hell? The singer had her in his arms still. There was no balcony between them now. His hands slid into her hair, keeping her head still. "Not yet," he begged, sliding his lips down her throat, nuzzling her jaw. "There's time yet, Toireasa," he murmured. "Time to say fare thee well properly,." "We should have returned to Ireland, Breandan," she whispered, as he loosened the ties on her gown and dropped it from her shoulders. The words came to her naturally, even as a tiny voice was raging in her mind, "What on earth are you saying, Taylor?" But that voice was being drowned out by the pure sensuousness he was stirring in her.

From the First World War to his death eighteen years later, George V spent just eight weeks abroad. George VI travelled widely as Duke of York but for much of his reign his capacity for travel was curtailed by war and ill health. The Queen, who had never left the country until shortly before her twenty-first birthday, has visited 135 separate nations, some of them several times. And yet she had to wait until she was eighty-five to visit the nearest of the lot – the Republic of Ireland – in May 2011.

8000 B.C.: Mistaking Irish Channel for heavy fog, Scottish shepherds wander into Ireland. They miss their sheep and go home, but memory lingers for hours.

Let me put it plainly for you. I want you. I want you on your knees. On your back. Bent over. I want to shove my face between your legs and feast on your cunt. I want you to obey me. I want to use you as my own personal little ballerina fuck toy and, in return, I’ll give you enough money to cover whatever you expected to get from your parents’ estate. You can go to whatever ballet academy you want, hell you can fucking buy it. You can travel the world, experience all the things you want.

The salmon traveled through the waters of the otherworld to Ireland, its perfect form gliding between worlds. Tuan mac Cairill came to Ireland as before the flood, retaining the memories of his centuries of dream lives as Irish totem animals. Incarnated as a salmon, he was eaten by the Queen of Ulster who became pregnant and gave birth to Tuan the human. Like the Sorcerer on the cave wall in France, he is a composite being of fin, wing, tusk, and antler. I had been a man, a stag, a boar, a bird, and now I was a fish. In all my changes I had joy and fulness of life. But in the water joy lay deeper, life pulsed deeper. For on land or air there is always something hindering. The stage has legs to be tucked away for sleep, and untucked for movement; and the bird has wings that must be folded and pecked and cared for. But the fish has but one piece from his nose to his tail. He is complete, single and unencumbered.

Travel Bucket List 1. Have a torrid affair with a foreigner. Country: TBD. 2. Stay for a night in Le Grotte della Civita. Matera, Italy. 3. Go scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef. Queensland, Australia. 4. Watch a burlesque show. Paris, France. 5. Toss a coin and make an epic wish at the Trevi Fountain. Rome, Italy. 6. Get a selfie with a guard at Buckingham Palace. London, England. 7. Go horseback riding in the mountains. Banff, Alberta, Canada. 8. Spend a day in the Grand Bazaar. Istanbul, Turkey. 9. Kiss the Blarney Stone. Cork, Ireland. 10. Tour vineyards on a bicycle. Bordeaux, France. 11. Sleep on a beach. Phuket, Thailand. 12. Take a picture of a Laundromat. Country: All. 13. Stare into Medusa’s eyes in the Basilica Cistern. Istanbul, Turkey. 14. Do NOT get eaten by a lion. The Serengeti, Tanzania. 15. Take a train through the Canadian Rockies. British Columbia, Canada. 16. Dress like a Bond Girl and play a round of poker at a casino. Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 17. Make a wish on a floating lantern. Thailand. 18. Cuddle a koala at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary. Queensland, Australia. 19. Float through the grottos. Capri, Italy. 20. Pose with a stranger in front of the Eiffel Tower. Paris, France. 21. Buy Alex a bracelet. Country: All. 22. Pick sprigs of lavender from a lavender field. Provence, France. 23. Have afternoon tea in the real Downton Abbey. Newberry, England. 24. Spend a day on a nude beach. Athens, Greece. 25. Go to the opera. Prague, Czech Republic. 26. Skinny dip in the Rhine River. Cologne, Germany. 27. Take a selfie with sheep. Cotswolds, England. 28. Take a selfie in the Bone Church. Sedlec, Czech Republic. 29. Have a pint of beer in Dublin’s oldest bar. Dublin, Ireland. 30. Take a picture from the tallest building. Country: All. 31. Climb Mount Fuji. Japan. 32. Listen to an Irish storyteller. Ireland. 33. Hike through the Bohemian Paradise. Czech Republic. 34. Take a selfie with the snow monkeys. Yamanouchi, Japan. 35. Find the penis. Pompeii, Italy. 36. Walk through the war tunnels. Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. 37. Sail around Ha long Bay on a junk boat. Vietnam. 38. Stay overnight in a trulli. Alberobello, Italy. 39. Take a Tai Chi lesson at Hoan Kiem Lake. Hanoi, Vietnam. 40. Zip line over Eagle Canyon. Thunderbay, Ontario, Canada.

It occurs to me that if the brief century of air travel had produced as many disasters, deaths and capital losses as any hundred years of maritime transport, then flying would have fallen out of favour long ago. The wreck of the Sea Horse, alone, in 1816, had meant 360 drowned. The explosion of the Hindenburg Zeppelin had killed a mere 35 of the 97 people on board, yet that one incident had brought an end to all serious development of airship travel. But we have been seafarers as a species for far longer than almost any other human activity and we’re somehow accepting of the risks.

People in Ireland believed that fairies or the gentle folk were not earthly, having originated on other planets. Fairies often travel about the skies in cloudlike aerial boats called “fairy boats” or “spectre ships” (Rojcewicz 1991, p. 481).

In this collection of essays, you will meet more people like Zakia - golden-hearted souls who come from places like Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Canada, Cuba, The Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Nepal, Spain, and Tanzania. People who become the heroes of our stories because they show the way or deliver joy, care for us when we're vulnerable, help us navigate meaning, or propel us when we're stuck. They are custodians of travel; they keep us believing in its magic.

Maloof controlled the exchequer, advised in regard to the imposition of taxes, fees, rents and imposts. Witherwood worked to codify the judicial systems of the land, reconciling regional differences and making the laws universally responsive, to persons of high and low degree alike. Sion-Tansifer, a relict from the reign of King Granice, advised as to military organisation and strategy. Foirry was an expert in the field of naval architecture. Pirmence, who had travelled widely, from Ireland to Byzantium, was in effect the Minister of Foreign Affairs, while Langlark had been commissioned by Aillas to establish at Domreis a university of letters, mathematics, geography and the several sciences.

Prince Albert, gravely ill, traveled directly to Ireland

Salmon are a migratory species of fish, which hatch upstream in fresh water before travelling seaward. The fish showed a brazen disregard for the delicate constitutional and boundary matters unfolding around them and they slipped through the jurisdictions.

I’d like to think the old stories would be cheering us on. Most land, if left alone, will return to woodland naturally over time, and we would be wise to allow more space for wild processes and wild places in these beloved islands. As we travel such uncertain times, and learn to change and adapt, there will be new woodland stories to tell. I hope you find inspiration here for the journey ahead.

He came across from the pond, the young man and his fridge travelling over land and sea searching for a meaning and purpose in their lives. We speak of Tony Hawks, the Fridge Man. Tony Hawks who came to live amongst us for all but a short while, a Messiah of sorts. We felt ourselves not worthy to touch the hem of his fridge, but then we realised that he was but an ordinary man, his fridge but a little fridge, the son of a bigger fridge--the Big Fridge--the huge, gigantic Fridge in the Sky.

One feature of the economic revival of the early seventeenth century was the rapid exploitation of the woodlands. During the Tudor period the destruction of the woods had already begun, though mainly for military reasons: they blocked the passage of the royal armies, and afforded secure fastnesses into which the more lightly-equipped Irish troops could easily retreat. It was therefore a constant policy of the government to open up passes; and during the later Elizabethan wars this was extended to a general clearance of large areas. Fynes Moryson, who travelled extensively in Ireland at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, declared that he had ‘been deceived in the common fame that all Ireland is woody’, for in the course of a journey from Armagh to Kinsale he found, except in Offaly, no woods at all, beyond ‘some low shrubby places which they call glens’. But Moryson’s description cannot be applied to the whole country. At the beginning of the seventeenth century there were still extensive woodlands in Munster; the great wood of Glenconkeyne in Ulster was reckoned by Sir John Davies to be as big as the New Forest in Hampshire; and even beyond these areas, the country was at this time fairly heavily timbered. But the process of destruction was soon to be speeded up.

The development of the 'New British History' (or preferably 'Archipelagic History') in the late twentieth century also lends itself to the study of the Northumbrian kingdom. The approach promotes the comparison, and tracing of contacts, between England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. It has been criticised for a focus on 'anglicisation', that is the extension of English power across the archipelago. Such an approach would indeed be problematic in relation to the tenth century, when English dominance was more of an aspiration than a reality, and even more so for the heyday of the autonomous Northumbrian kingdom. In contrast, my book investigates influences travelling in the other direction, those emanating from the Gaelic world. I therefore favour a version of the Archiplagic approach in which influences travel in numerous directions, and the various communities 'interact so as to modify the conditions of each other's existence'.

My first interviewer, my very first, photographed me. I told him that he was wasting a plate, but he went on and wasted three. Why did he do it? If I were a very beautiful woman I could understand it, though I think it would be a mistake to photograph Venus herself on the gangway of a steamer at eight o'clock in the morning in a downpour of rain.

A walking stick is no real use except to a lame man. The walker does not push himself along with it. He does not, when he sets out from home, expect to meet any one whom he wants to hit.

The volume offers an overview of how British writers interpreted the French Enlightenment and Revolution against the backdrop of the Terror and the rise and fall of Napoleon, these events welcomed by few and feared by many in Britain as likely to foment a second revolution in that state as the United Irish insurrection had attempted to do in Ireland. Deane’s focus is on the intellectual careers of Edmund Burke, James Mackintosh, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Hazlitt, though there are slighter cameos also of William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, John Wilson Croker, Francis Jeffrey, Thomas Holcroft, Thomas Paine, and Joseph Priestley. The study teases out how the main figures here engaged conceptually with some of their leading French counterparts including Jean Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, Baron d’Holbach, La Mettrie, Helvétius, and others. It examines instances of the intricate relay of ideas of freedom and liberty as they migrated from England into the works of the eighteenth-century French philosophes and then travelled from there back to nineteenth-century England, where French writings were rejected or reabsorbed by some of the leading English writers of the apocalyptic years between Burke’s late career and those that ended the first Romantic generation.