We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

"And the leavening agent is, to a large extent, Mr."

"The result is a comprehensive work of social criticism that tells the story of a country that was once so fixated on maintaining an idealized vision of its past that it almost gave up on the prospect of a better future ..."

"While his sweeping, authoritative and profoundly intelligent book sees modern Ireland through the lens of his own life and that of his family, it also offers sharp and brilliant analysis of what form change took when it arrived in Ireland ..."

"It would be unfair to be too critical, though."

"public events have the irresistible tang of the actual, and around them O'Toole—who has had a substantial career as a journalist, a political commentator, and a drama critic—beautifully tells the private story of his childhood and youth."

"astonishing in its range."

"A superb illustration of how the personal is the political and can be the universal."

"O'Toole's cast of characters—priests and politicians, businessmen and revolutionaries, his father Sammy, a bus conductor and his mother Mary, a worker in a cigarette factory—is epic ..."

"The book begins, much like the era it represents, a little precariously."

"O'Toole has a ball in dissecting Charles Haughey and his psychology, and it makes for a gripping portrait; fittingly, given the degree to which Haughey's 'mastery of hypocrisy was mesmerising, exquisite, magisterial', he writes about him more than any other politician."