At the end of his court-martial on August 16th, 1920, Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, greeted his sentence of two years in jail by declaring: 'I have decided the term of my imprisonment...I shall be free, alive or dead, within a month.' Four days earlier, British troops had stormed the City Hall in Cork and arrested MacSwiney on charges of possessing an RIC cipher and documents likely to cause disaffection to his Majesty. He immediately began a hunger strike that sparked riots on the streets of Barcelona, caused workers to down tools on the New York waterfront, and prompted mass demonstrations from Buenos Aires to Boston. Enthralled by MacSwiney breaking all previous records for a prisoner going without food, the international press afforded the case so much coverage that Ireland's War of Independence was suddenly parachuted onto the world stage, and King George V was considering over-ruling Prime Minister Lloyd George and enduring a constitutional crisis. As his wife, brothers and sisters kept daily vigil around his bed in Brixton Prison, watching his strength ebb away hour by hour, MacSwiney's fast had Michael Collins preparing reprisal assassinations, Ho Chi Minh waxing lyrical about the Corkman's bravery, and rumours abounding that he was being secretly fed via the communion wafer being given to him each day by his chaplain. Using newly-released archive material, Dave Hannigan has pieced together a gripping, dramatic, and poignant account of one man's courageous stand against the might of an empire.

Máire MacSwiney Brugha is the only child of Terence MacSwiney, one of the greatest figures in Ireland's history, who died after seventy-three days on hunger strike in Brixton Prison on 25 October 1920. His death became worldwide news. MacSwiney is reputed to have been quoted by Mahatma Gandhi as the main inspiration for his own life's work leading to the downfall of the British empire in India; Ho Chi Minh said of MacSwiney: 'A nation which has such citizens will never surrender.' At the time of his death Máire was a young child. Her mother, Muriel, a member of the wealthy Murphy distillery family, had made an extraordinary and controversial match in marrying MacSwiney. The young widow then abandoned Ireland for continental Europe, taking her little daughter with her. For nine years Máire was to live away from Ireland, mostly in Germany with occasional breaks in Paris with her mother. She grew up effectively as a German child, speaking the German language, skiing to school -- and forgetting all about her Irish background. This was truly an extraordinary upbringing for the daughter of one of Ireland's greatest heroes. In the early thirties, when she was fourteen, Máire made a dramatic escape with her aunt, Máire MacSwiney, the sister of Terence, home to Ireland, against her mother's wishes. This was widely reported and led to a court case claiming that her aunt had 'kidnapped' her -- but Máire strongly refutes this in her account here. Speaking no English or Irish, the young Máire now went to live in Scoil Íte, her aunt's school in Cork. For the young Máire this was a very strange world indeed. Now she had to learn both Irish and English, her Irish being perfected by long annual holidays in the west Kerry Gaeltacht near Dunquin. And then, in 1945, she married Ruairi Brugha, the son of another famous republican, Cathal Brugha, thus uniting two of Ireland's most prominent and revered nationalist families. Throughout her life, both before marriage and later with her husband, Máire has handled a complex inheritance and forged her own strong identity. She and her husband have reinterpreted their unique inheritance in keeping their own time and their own mindset while retaining strong links to their unusual history.

Audiences around the globe continue to flock to see the latest releases from Marvel and DC studios, making it clear that superhero films resonate with the largest global audience that Hollywood has ever reached. Yet despite dominating theater screens like never before, the superhero genre remains critically marginalized—ignored at best and more often actively maligned. Terence McSweeney examines this global phenomenon, providing a concise and up-to-date overview of the superhero genre. He lays out its narrative codes and conventions, exploring why it appeals to diverse audiences and what it has to say about the world in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Unpacking the social, ideological, and cultural content of superhero films, he argues that the genre should be considered a barometer of contemporary social anxieties and a reflection of cultural values. McSweeney scrutinizes representations of gender, race, and sexuality as well as how the genre’s conventions relate to and comment on contemporary political debates. Beyond American contributions to the genre, the book also features extensive analysis of superhero films from all over the world, contrasting them with the dominant U.S. model. The book’s presentation of a range of case studies and critical debates is accessible and engaging for students, scholars, and enthusiasts at all levels.

Tadhg Barry was the last high-profile victim of the crown forces during the Irish War of Independence. A veteran republican, trade unionist, journalist, poet, GAA official and alderman on Cork Corporation, he was shot dead in Ballykinlar internment camp on 15 November 1921. Barry's tragic death was a huge, but subsequently largely forgotten, event in Ireland. Dublin came to a standstill as a quarter of a million people lined the streets and the IRA had its last full mobilisation before the Treaty split. The funeral in Cork echoed those of Barry's comrades, the martyred lord mayors Tomás MacCurtain and Terence MacSwiney. The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed three weeks later, all internees were released and the movement that elevated him to hero/martyr status was ripped asunder in the ensuing civil war. The name of Tadhg Barry became lost in the smoke. This is the first biography of a fascinating activist described by his British enemies as an 'Utter disloyalist' and by a comrade as 'a characteristic product of Rebel Cork – courageous, kindly, generous to a fault, bold and daring, and independent in speech and action'. It offers fascinating new perspectives on the dynamics of Ireland's long revolution, including glimpses of the roads not taken.

Historian and IRA leader Florence O'Donoghue describes his experiences as head of intelligence in Cork city during the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921). He candidly assesses the leaders of this period, including Tomas MacCurtain, Sean O'Hegarty, Terence MacSwiney and Michael Collins and critically examines the evolution of the Irish Volunteer citizen-soldiers. He also details his wife Josephine's role as the top IRA spy in Cork's British Army headquarters, working for the rebels in exchange for the return of her eldest son, lost in a bitter custody battle with her in-laws. After O'Donoghue kidnapped the child and reunited him with his mother, the two collaborators eventually fell in love and were secretly married in the spring of 1921. Forty years later, the couple presented their story to their children in order to explain the family secret that had haunted their domestic lives. The first part of the book is O'Donoghue's and his wife's account of their activities in the Anglo-Irish War, written in 1961; the second part is composed of 47 letters in diary form, written by O'Donoghue to his wife while he was 'on the run' during the last ten weeks of the Anglo-Irish War, from May to July 1921. They provide a rare snapshot of the daily life of fugitive IRA guerrillas.

What is literary noir? How do British and American noir thrillers relate to their historical contexts? In considering such questions, this study ranges over hundreds of novels, analysing the politics and poetics of noir from the hard-boiled fiction of Hammett, Chandler and Cain to the exciting diversity of nineties thrillers, with sections on the tough investigators, gangsters and victims of the Depression years: the first-person killers, femmes fatales and black protagonists of mid-century; the game-players, voyeurs and consumers of contemporary thrillers and future noir.