These Divided Isles
A vital history from the award-winning Financial Times journalist Philip Stephens on the dramatic century since the Anglo-Irish Treaty and partition.
These Divided Isles tells the story from both sides of the Irish Sea. Cutting through the layers of grievance and prejudice it explores the emotional intimacy and enmity of a relationship shaped by close familial ties and clashing national identities. It’s a story written by big political leaders – David Lloyd George, Michael Collins, Winston Churchill and Eamon de Valera – and the millions of Irish emigrants who crossed from Ireland to Britain to begin new lives.
Today demography, Brexit and political logic have brought the possibility of Irish unity into view. Grounded in decades of personal contact and interviews with key policymakers across Britain and Europe, Stephens maps this complex relationship and asks how Ireland might deploy its history to inform its future rather than hold it in place.
"Stephens' account of the jagged divisions between Britain and Ireland over the last century and the repeated attempts to heal them is masterful and beautifully written. It is interlaced with his own experiences from his mother's home in Killtimagh in County Mayo and as the leading political commentator in London for two decades. Required reading for anyone interested in how the Troubles ended and what the final answer to the Irish question might be."
"One of the most astute and informed modern commentators on British politics and its foreign policy . . . Stephens has written a profound, authoritative and readable account of the troubled relations between Britain and Ireland"
