Surely an essential reference book, which seems to cover everything and everyone from St Patrick (yes, he did exist) down to numerous twentieth-century figures. Regular use of it over a long period of time might reveal some omissions, but it is difficult to spot any obvious ones straightaway. Modern historicism, of course, tends to discount myths and popular tradition in favour of documentary evidence, so that the figure of Brian Borumha which emerges from this book is not the old schoolbook one, nor is Cromwell quite the ogre of Irish national tradition. However, the book as a whole is not an orgy of fashionable Revisionism; it is a sober compilation of scholarship and factual research.