These days Irish horses dominate jump racing, while one of the finest Derby winners of recent years was Sea The Stars. The greatest steeplechasing horse of all time, Arkle, was Irish-bred & trained. Nijinsky, winner of Englands great flat races, was trained in Irel&. Now, Brian O? Connor, Racing Correspondent of the Irish Times, selects a dozen truly great Irish horses of the last hundred years of racing history & devotes a chapter to each, assessing their calibre against the horses they had to beat, & analysing the particular source of each horses greatness. The horses O? Connor selects are wonderfully different. There is Arkles almost unearthly indestructibility, utterly trouncing the opposition whatever weight he had to carry in the toughest, most arduous steeplechases, & on the other hand there is Sinndar, the Aga Khans colt whose quicksilver speed saw him become the first horse ever to win the treble of Epsom Derby, Irish Derby & Prix de l? Arc de Triomphe. There is Orby, the first Irish-trained Derby winner at the start of the twentieth century, owned by an Irish-born New York union hard man the King refused to meet, & Moscow Flyer, just as likely to lose concentration & fall, but on his day a brilliant chaser over two miles, the toughest jumping challenge of all. There is the great hurdler Istabraq & the Gold Cup winner Dawn Run, as well as Alleged, the ?forgotten horse? that won back-to-back victories under Lester Piggott in the Prix de l? Arc de Triomphe, & Vintage Crop, who went all the way to Australia in 1993 & won the Melbourne Cup. Witty & trenchant & formidably well-informed, Irelands Greatest Racehorses is a hugely enjoyable celebration of some of the finest racehorses of all time. ...

As dramatic as a good novel, this is the first intimate biography of Katie ' Kitty' O' Shea, the woman whose scandalous love affair with the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell altered the course of Irish history. At the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Stewart Parnell, MP, was the only man who both the English government & Irish radicals believed could secure Home Rule for Irel&. But when Parnell met & fell in love with Katie O' Shea, a married woman, Parnell's life
- & Ireland's history
- would change for ever. When Parnell was named as co-respondent in Katie's divorce & revealed as the father of three of Katie's children their affair triggered the most notorious scandal of the Victorian era. Elisabeth Kehoe's vivid biography introduces us to a woman entirely unrecognisable as the home-wrecker & historical catastrophe of subsequent myth. From this book emerges, for the first time, the real Katie O' Shea: a gifted woman who influenced political policy with an acuity & sensitivity sorely lacking in her lover.

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Books History Books If we seal off the past, how will we ever know the truth? In 1942, in Nazi-occupied Pol&, a Jewish child was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto in a backpack. That child was Karen Kirsten’s mother, but she knew nothing about this extraordinary event until one day a letter arrived from a stranger. After Karen eventually discovered the grandparents she loved dearly were in fact not her biological grandparents, she travelled the globe to uncover her family’s past & to find the answers to baffling questions: why did her adoptive grandmother treat Karen’s mother so unkindly? Why did she hide the truth that she was her mother’s aunt? & why, if she appeared to dislike Karen’s mother, did she risk her life to save her & bring her to Australia? Irena’s Gift weaves together a mystery, history & memoir to tell the story of a family torn apart by war. From the glittering concert halls of interbellum Warsaw to the vermin-infested prison where a Jewish woman... ...

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