Napper Tandy invaded Ireland with the French, was an ambassador for the United Irishmen in the States, was arrested in Hamburg by the English a stone’s throw ahead of Napoleon’s armies, and was sentenced to death by the English but never executed, a fact which may well have denied him the martyrdom and fame which came to others like Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmett. He was a Brigadier General in the French Republican Army, and received both salary and pension as such until the day he died in h...

Oliver Cromwell has been the subject of books, learned journals, less learned articles, TV and radio programmes, countless times. He has had proponents and opponents. He has been revered and reviled, but far too seldom has he been understood. Perhaps the most scholarly of recent books on the subject is that by Dr Micheál Ó Siochrú (you might find it easier to call him Michael Sugrue) who is a Senior Lecturer in History at Trinity College Dublin. He is a specialist in Seventeenth Century Ir...

This is the story of Zimbabwe - told as a series of dramatised adventures interspersed with just a little history. It covers the period from around 1000 AD to the current year, 2012.

It was the 10th September, 1798. Napper Tandy was afloat, which he hated. She was a corvette. Her name was the Anacréon. What a name for a bloody ship-of-war, he thought. Whether she was named after a Greek composer of drinking and love songs or a French composer of operas, it was not a name for a war-ship.She was fast, though, that he admitted. And well armed, this 100 ton corvette, with her fourteen four pounders and a pair of swivels, but her main protection was her speed. The fa...

This is the second in the series of LiteBite Books telling the story of Ireland. It takes us from 1366 to 1791, perhaps the most defining period of Ireland's history. Book 2 looks at that extraordinary family of Fitzgeralds known as the Geraldines and sees them transformed from Normans into Irish; That sets the scene onto which bursts the most seminal event in Irish History, Henry VIII of England and his break with the Church of Rome. In itself that was no great thing, but followed as it w...

Daniel O'Connell had an exciting life, spiced with duelling, Revolution, and girls galore until his marriage. That marriage astonishingly for the times, was a love match, far from the norm in those days. Dan was born in 1785 into the family of what was really a smuggler baron. At the age of 15 he was sent to school in France, but had to flee three years later on the day Louis XVI was guillotined in Paris. So it was England for the first time in his life, and he spent three years there, lea...

This is the story of Ireland – not just her History, but her story. Her Music, her Poetry and Theatre, her ancient Brehon laws. How people lived in the times of Brian Boru, what they wore and what they ate and drank. It’s the story of her roads, her railways, her canals. It’s the story of her industries, her agriculture, her linen, her ship building, and her modern financial revolution. It’s the story of the Irish in America, and the trials and tribulations they faced to get there. But it’...

This is a Litebite Book, a little more than 7,000 words long. The Great Famine which afflicted Ireland between 1846 and 1851 is perhaps the most studied, the most commented upon, the most reviled, and yet the most formative event in modern Irish History. Many books have been written about the famine, most recently The Famine Plot: England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy (2012) by Tim-Pat Coogan. What was the Famine? What caused it? Why did so many die, or leave if they could? I look a...

This is a tale of the 19th century; of Ireland, Australia, and the United States of America; of Fenians and travel; of English prisons and the Australian Outback; and of the Great Rescue of Six Fenian political prisoners from the Fremantle Convict Establishment in South West Australia.

This book is written as a novel. It is based on the life of John Boyle O'Reilly, not perhaps as well known as it deserves to be, in Ireland at any rate. He was born in 1844 in Drogheda, and died in Hull, Massachusetts USA in 1890, of an accidental overdose of his wife's sleeping pills. He was a writer, poet, journalist, and above all an Irish Nationalist, like so many other young men of his times who were born Catholics in Ireland.I have stuck to his real life story as closely as I ...

"To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything." So wrote Otto Lilienthal, the man who inspired the Wright brothers. "To Fly is Everything" is a compendium of stories about flying adventures of a father and son, the father in the RAF and the son in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Bill Igoe learned to fly an aeroplane in 1934, forty years after the death of the Wright Brothers' inspiration Otto Lilienthal. In the RAF, after a spectacular crash in 1938 whic...

This is a Litebite Book, about the equal of forty or so pages of a Paperback or Pocket Book. 'The Daniel O'Connell story ‒ Book One: Youth'is the first in a series telling the story of Daniel O'Connell, called in his own day the Uncrowned King of Ireland. This first Book takes us from his birth in 1775 to 1800. It follows Daniel O'Connell from his birth and upbringing in the family of what was really a smuggler baron in Kerry at the end of the 18th century, through his education in Ireland...