The Lilliput Press: 235 books

'Many people will remember Melosina's voice from Sunday Miscellany', where these pieces were first broadcast, or have read them in Irishwoman's Diary' in The Irish Times. Though all of her writing conveys her distinctive slant on things, relatively few of her essays were directly concerned with her...

'In the Dublin of my day there was the kind of desperate freedom which comes from a lack of responsibility, for the English were in governance then, so everyone said what he liked. Now I hear since the Free State came in there is less freedom. The Church has made inroads everywhere, so that we are...

As I shall embark in a business, within a few days, the event of which is uncertain, I take the opportunity of a vacant hour to throw on paper a few memorandums relative to myself and my family ...' So begins Theobald Wolfe Tone's riveting autobiography, commenced in 1796 before he sailed with the...

In the aftermath of the Great Famine of 1845-52, the Martin Estate in the West of Ireland, 200,000-acres of bog and mountain, was put up for sale. Its mortgagees, the London Law Life Insurance Society, evicted many of the tenants, and in February 1853 sent Thomas Colville Scott to conduct a survey...

Compiled while Nelson Mandela was still in prison, 'In the Prison of His Day's is one of the earliest books about Mandela to have been published in the English language. 'This miscellany of writings was brought together to mark Nelson Mandela's seventieth birthday. Given that prison walls have surrounded...

'I have to say the book is an unalloyed pleasure to hold and to glance through -- a sensual delight. It is an absolute credit to everyone involved. Paper, typeface, photos -- the whole production is a glowing tribute to the art of the book itself and a wonderful reminder of why we ever fell in love...

Born of a Belfast manse, Robert Lynd (1879-1949) became one of the most graceful and favoured writers of the early century, and had some thirty books published in his lifetime. The essays in Galway of the Races represent his writings on Ireland (Protestant and Papish, with accounts of Connolly, Kettle,...

The Plummeting Old Women by Daniil Kharms is a collection of stories, incidents, dialogues and fragments that forms an important part of the buried literature of Russian modernism now revealed under glasnost. These texts are characterized by a startling and macabre novelty, with elements of the grotesque,...

'The charm of this book lies in its peep-show perspective on Dublin public life in the latter part of the 18th century.' - David Nokes, The Sunday Times 'A vastly entertaining and colourful memoir... The book offers a tremendous flavour of an era. Mrs Leeson's intelligence shines through and her sense...

Irish identity is best understood from a maritime perspective. For eight millennia the island has been a haven for explorers, settlers, colonists, navigators, pirates and traders, absorbing goods and peoples from all points of the compass. The reduction of the islanders to the exclusive category 'Celtic'...

This volume sheds new light on the life and works of Jack B. Yeats, the talented painter and poet too often overshadowed by his older brother William, through a collection of previously published and unpublished letters from John Butler Yeats to his son Jack, and from Jack to his father, John Quinn,...

'Receding imperialism usually leaves behind those who have for generations staunchly upheld its authority and flourished under its aegis-Germans in Bohemia, Swedes in Finland, Greeks in Asia Minor, Muslims in the Balkans. Among those abandoned adherents of a lost cause were the unionists in the south...

A new and original work from "one of the most accomplished and original writers of our time", Joseph Heller. A Singular Country is J.P. Donleavy's idiosyncratic and personal view of Ireland told in the vernacular of the Irishman, which he has nearly, but not quite, become. "A country...

"Haverty's book remains a classic in Irish biography, and a rollicking good read."- Lauren Arrington, The Irish Times. Since its first publication Anne Haverty's biography has been recognized as a landmark in Markievicz studies, giving a historically complete account of a woman often...