Vivid Faces

A searing cultural history of the remarkable generation who transformed Ireland, from R. F. Foster

OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOKS OF THE YEAR and OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014

Vivid Faces surveys the lives and beliefs of the people who made the Irish Revolution: linked together by youth, radicalism, subversive activities, enthusiasm and love. Determined to reconstruct the world and defining themselves against their parents, they were in several senses a revolutionary generation.

The Ireland that eventually emerged bore little relation to the brave new world they had conjured up in student societies, agit-prop theatre groups, vegetarian restaurants, feminist collectives, volunteer militias, Irish-language summer schools, and radical newspaper offices. Roy Foster''s book investigates that world, and the extraordinary people who occupied it.

Looking back from old age, one