In print continuously for more than thirty years, this book is long established as a reliable and affectionate portrait of Michael Collins. First, published in 1971, its great strength is that the author was able to interview Collins' surviving contemporaries and was offered unrestricted access to personal and family material. Michael Collins: The Lost Leader has been praised by authorities such as Robert Kee and Maurice Manning and remains compulsive reading even today.

When President of the Irish Republic Michael Collins signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, he remarked to Lord Birkenhead, 'I may have signed my actual death warrant.' In August 1922 during the Irish Civil War, that prophecy came true – Collins was shot and killed by a fellow Irishman in a shocking political assassination. So ended the life of the greatest of all Irish nationalists, but his visions and legacy lived on. This authorative and comprehensive biography presents the life of a man who became a legend in his own lifetime, whose idealistic vigour and determination were matched only by his political realism and supreme organisational abilities. Coogan's biography provides a fascinating insight into a great political leader, whilst vividly portraying the political unrest in a divided Ireland, that can help to shape our understanding of Ireland's recent tumultuous socio-political history.

In this completely revised and updated book, T. Ryle Dwyer, offers a fresh perspective on Collins' activities. With new information about his role in organising the IRB in London in his youth right through to his death in 1922, Dwyer's analysis supports the case for Collins as the chief architect of the Irish victory over the British Empire. Michael Collins co-ordinated the sweeping Sinn Féin election victory of 1918 and put structure on the organisation of the IRA. He was the prototype of the urban terrorist and the architect of the war against the Black and Tans. While many have questioned whether Collins ever fired a shot at an enemy of Ireland, he did order the deaths of people standing in his way, and he even advocated kidnapping a US President.

When Asquith introduced his bill for Home Rule for Ireland in 1912, he sparked a decade of turbulence and violence for Ireland and her people. Michael Collins played a crucial role in rekindling Ireland's aspirations for freedom. A leading figure in the nation's bitter and bloody resistance to British Rule, he played a key part in reshaping Ireland's history as we know it today. Ulick O'Connor includes valuable new information about the secret war against England and provides a fresh and highly dramatic account of Ireland's fight for freedom. Using important material from the archives of General Richard Mulcahy, Collins's chief of staff, as well as personal interviews with Mulcahy, Eamon de Valera, and many other leading figures Michael Collins and the Troubles is a vivid and often horrifying account of a crucial time, the consequences of which are still felt today.