Ascendancy to Oblivion by Michael McConville
'I recommend this book as pure pleasure' says Molly Keane 'I found myself ecstatically immersed in the most entertaining and fascinating book I have read for a long time'. Having traced the origins of the Anglo-Irish, the author offers a colourful account of the rise and sudden disappearance of the Protestant oligarchy that dominated Irish life from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and a general survey of Irish history.