Dave Hannigan: 5 books

On December 11, 1981, Muhammad Ali slumped on a chair in the cramped, windowless locker room of a municipal baseball field outside Nassau. A phalanx of sportswriters had pushed and shoved their way into this tiny, breeze-blocked space. In this most unlikely of settings, they had come to record the...

At the end of his court-martial on August 16th, 1920, Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, greeted his sentence of two years in jail by declaring: ‘I have decided the term of my imprisonment…I shall be free, alive or dead, within a month.’ Four days earlier, British troops had stormed...

‘With three seconds remaining in the Super Bowl, it falls to the New York Giants’ place-kicker Shaun Reedy. … He’s kicked it … but no, it’s gone left and wide…...’ Peter, Davey, and the rest of the Dromtarry Under-11 Gaelic football team are busy training for the start of a...

A collage of personal memories passed over into family myth, Boy Wonder is a funny and moving account of a childhood spent, like countless others, on pitches, sidelines and stands, struggling to make sense of competition and the outsized role it plays in the lives of men and boys, fathers and sons....

Retraces the steps of an incredible journey of a leader in exile that would resonate through Irish history for the rest of the century ... In June 1919 Eamon de Valera stowed away on a liner bound for New York and walked into the Waldorf-Astoria using the title ‘President of Ireland’. He...