The Lilliput Press: 235 books

'I have felt the need for a change of scene and interest lately.' -Lady Bailey on the eve of her London-Cape Town flight, March 1928. Mary Westenra, born in 1890, was the daughter of Derry Westenra, the fifth Baron Rossmore of Rossmore Castle, Co. Monaghan, a famous sportsman and rake. After a youth...

From 1901 to 1967 this Dublin restaurant - so famous in its day that letters simply addressed 'Jammet's, Europe' reached their destination within a week - was the resort of actors, politicians, artists and literati, film stars, judges, journalists, doctors, chancers and characters, gourmets and oenophiles,...

London, 1950s. Mr Tobias, the Fulham tailor, makes young Emilio Scala a fingertip drape and he fills it, a Teddy boy extraordinaire. By day he still serves cornets and wafers on the North End Road at Scala's Ice Cream Parlour, but at night he's in Chelsea getting bloodstains on the suit, tearing out...

THIS IS THE FIRST FULL-LENGTH BIOGRAPHY OF THE GREAT RAILWAY ENGINEER WILLIAM DARGAN (1799-1867), WHO CHANGED THE FACE OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY IRELAND. The son of a County Carlow farmer, he began his career in Wales on the Holyhead Road, working under the famous Scottish engineer, Thomas Telford. He...

Cowslips and Chainies is a poignant memoir of childhood in 1930s and early '40s Dublin. Best-selling novelist Elaine Crowley's account of tenement life is by turns hilarious and intensely sad. Her beloved, consumptive father – generous, handsome and fickle – works at the local undertakers. Her...

This book is one of the most remarkable and the most entertaining of its kind ever published about late Victorian and Edwardian Ireland.' - Peter Costello, Sunday Independent. 'A woman of considerable style and substance, her autobiography gives a fascinating glimpse into the social and political...

A hundred years ago servants underpinned middle- and upper-class life in Ireland, and domestic service was the major source of employment for women before social conditions changed utterly after the First World War and labour-saving appliances took their place. Two generations on the domestic servant...

Flann O'Brien (Brian O'Nolan, aka Myles na Gopaleen) adopted not only a new name (George Knowall) for these rarely seen pieces, but also a new persona. Writing his column 'Bones of Contention' for the Nationalist and Leinster Times, he took on the character of the quizzical and enquiring humorist...

With the deregulation of international trade and a free movement of capital, the world economy is more unstable than ever and liable to economic collapse. So precarious is it that it should no longer be relied upon to provided all the goods, fuel, food and services we need to live. As unemployment...

"This is a stunning biography. It is compelling, lyrical and contains detailed research, travel writing, in-depth analysis of a personality and a fascinating story. The author's research has become a book that will sit alongside other great biographies, and will be referred to and praised for...

Ninette de Valois, the world-famous prima ballerina, was born Edris Stannus in 1898 and raised at Baltiboys in County Wicklow. In this autobiography, first published in 1957 and now appearing in a new paperback edition, she writes about her extraordinary career - the vivid memories of home in Ireland;...

Dublin is the only city in the world to produce three Nobel Prize winners for literature. An indication that something remarkable was taking place, not only in the capital but in the whole country, came in the extraordinary confluence of talent which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century....

'It is the battle between those who use a toothbrush and those who don't.' So wrote Augusta Gregory to W.B. Yeats; she was referring to the riots at the Abbey Theatre over The Playboy of the Western World, and she knew which side she was on. In this remarkable biographical essay, Colm Toíbín examines...

'Séamas Ó Sìocháin has written what is the most voluminous biography of Casement and a significant contribution to an understanding of his life.' Frank Callinan, The Irish Times Roger Casement is among the most written about and mythologized figures in Irish history, yet has never, until now,...