Erskine Childers, by Jim Ring (John Murray, £12.99 in UK)
It is indicative of Childers's standing in Britain that the sub-title to this biography should be "Author of The Riddle of the Sands". It is also a proof of how different the British and Irish viewpoints on history - particularly recent history - can be. But then, Childers in himself is a strange and almost hybrid figure: English-born, but brought up in Ireland after the death of his parents by his kindly relatives, the Bartons. His education was English, he worked as a clerk in the House of Commons and served in the Boer War; his famous novel, too, was impeccably British and even imperialist. How much his life was changed by marriage to a high-powered Boston American with strong political and other views, is a major question. Like Casement, he was an imperial servant who began to question imperialism before, finally, taking up arms against it - or more correctly, by running in arms for the Irish nationalist cause (though he still served England loyally during the first World War). As is well known, after the Treaty split he threw in his lot with the republicans in the Civil War and became their chief propagandist, though he was never a man of blood and was without personal rancour. It seems that London had targeted him early on as one of the men most bitterly opposed to any settlement of the Irish question on a dominion basis - in other words, as an irreconcilable, and the Free State thought the same. Childers's execution, even at a time when bitterness on both sides had got out of control and human life was cheap, now seems a miserable miscarriage of justice. He comes over, in this conscientious and readable biography, as an often tortured idealist out of place in an increasingly violent and amoral world.