We are entering the years of commemoration centred on the centenary of the Easter Rising. This generously illustrated popular history looks backward and forward from the Rising and surveys the entire period of the Irish Revolution.

Beginning with the Ulster crisis of 1912, it traces the turbulent events of the following years down to the final report of the Boundary Commission in 1925 which stabilised the border between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland.

Naturally, the Easter Rising of 1916 is the central event. It is often thought of as a foundation event, but it was not. It was transformative, however. Irish nationalism had been a potent force since the 1790s but the Rising and its consequences raised the stakes to new and previously unimagined heights. The more the stakes were raised by nationalist Ireland, however, the more likely it became that the unionists of Ulster could not be accommodated, so that republicanism and partition marched hand in hand. This is one of the tragic ironies of the whole story.

The Ireland that emerged from the revolutionary period is the Ireland with which we are all so familiar. The series of events, so vividly described in this book and so generously illustrated with photographs and maps, have made the island that we know.