This is a biography of the music critic and commentator, chronicling his family's history over 300 years at Kilmacurragh in County Wicklow (now a celebrated arboretum in the care of the State), and his work for the Irish Times over thirty years (1955-88).

There is a comprehensive view of his Irish background, his education in England at Rugby and Cambridge and his career in Dublin. Beginning with the rich source material of Acton family papers (a detailed tenant record of Kilmacurragh estate, for example) and correspondence (to his mother and others), the book goes on to elaborate in fascinating detail the cultural framework of his milieu in broadcasting for RTE and in music with the Royal Irish Academy of Music, of which he was governor and eventually vice-president.

He was one of only two critics outside Britain to gain entry to the Critics' Circle. His was a unique voice that helped to shape Ireland's musical culture.

The author: Richard Pine, writer and critic, is author of well-received books on Brian Friel and Oscar Wilde, as well as the standard work Music and Broadcasting in Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2005). He is director of the Durrell School of Corfu, where he lives.

Release date: June 2010

This book tells the remarkable story of an Irishman whose exploits in the bare-knuckle ring made him into an early 19th century folk hero. His victories over highly regarded English opponents came in the wake of several armed rebellions and were seen as symbolizing his country's fight for freedom from Westminster rule. A monument celebrating his triumph against George Cooper on the Curragh of Kildare stands in Donnelly's Hollow, named in his honour, alongside his carved-out footprints.

One of the many legends about Donnelly claimed that he so impressed the Prince Regent (later King George the Fourth) that he was granted a knighthood. On being greeted by the Regent as ‘the best fighting man in Ireland', Donnelly is said to have replied, ‘I am not that, your royal highness, but I am the best in England'.

Donnelly's life was less than exemplary outside the ring: a heavy drinker, he never made any profit from his four Dublin pubs, and his sexual adventures led to him paying the price for ‘chasing petticoats' while supposedly training for a fight in England.

Even after his sudden death at the age of 32, Donnelly continued to make news. His body was stolen from the grave by the notorious ‘Sack ‘Em Ups' and his mighty right arm was cut off. To this day, the grisly relic remains an object of fascination for countless viewers as it travels the world in exhibitions. In 2008, Donnelly was inducted into the International Hall of Fame.

The Author:

Patrick Myler is a boxing writer and Dublin historian, author of The Fighting Irish: Ireland's role in world boxing history and A Century of Boxing Greats, amongst others. He worked as a journalist in England before taking the post of chief sub-editor of the Sunday News in Belfast. On returning to his native Dublin, he served as chief sub-editor and then as an assistant editor of the Evening Herald for thirty years. He now writes a weekly boxing column for that paper.

A book that for the first time details all 315 Irish forests and woodlands north and south open to the Irish public — visited, photographed and researched by the author over the course of five years. All woodlands are photographed and described in detail with information given on directions, parking, walking distances and terrain. Major woodwalks are mapped and featured on a county-by-county basis, with the co-operation of the Ordnance Survey and assistance from the Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Coillte, the Society of Irish Foresters, the Forestry Service of Northern Ireland and the Irish Tree Society.

Complete with glossary, index and species guide, this handsome large-format fully illustrated book will be an invaluable guide to visitor, conservator, forester and dendrophile, or for those who simply want to avail of the resources of Ireland's countryside.

The Author: Donal Magner is an international forestry consultant and journalist, a correspondent with the Irish Farmer's Journal and secretary of the Wood Marketing Federation. He is editor of the Forestry and Timber Yearbook.

The Farm by Lough Gur was first published in London in 1937 and quickly reprinted. It was well received in England and a best-seller in Dublin. Some questioned its quiet recall of an elysian rural Ireland before the Land War, its image of a contented Victorian world in the rich lands of east Limerick that rather jarred with the rhetoric of De Valera's Ireland. Its woodcut images seemed English not Irish, and its ambiguous authorship gave ammunition to the doubters - was this really the voice of old Mary Fogarty, née O'Brien, or the heavily edited text produced by an Anglo-Irish friend and littérateur, Mary Lady Carbery?

The text was indeed crafted by Mary Carbery, a sharp observer and accomplished essayist who published a fine memoir of her own childhood in 1942 (Happy world). But the pungent strength of the book rests on Mary Fogarty's contribution: the draft notes and papers that she sent over to Mary Carbery, fleshed out by information supplied by other members of the O'Brien clan. Her memories provide what remains an entirely convincing account of the lost world of the strong-farm family in post-famine Munster, one far more secure in its social status than that of other Catholic writers such as Charles Kickham or Canon Sheehan. It depicts a social hierarchy of dominant men and credulous servants and hangers-on, mirroring the hierarchy of formal religiosity that overlaid the rich landscape of folk belief and custom. The predominant register may indeed be Mary Carbery's, but the social description is authentic and convincing. As Thomas McGreevy, a perceptive early reviewer, noted: ‘the book is like a symphony in terms of portraiture, for the characters are vividly depicted, not only as individuals, but as influencing each others' lives … Mrs. Fogarty, standing apart from them all and obser-ving them all with her unerring instinct for the humanly significant, has, under Lady Carbery's well-nigh perfect editing, put them and herself on the literary map of Ireland as clearly as Pushkin put the characters in his stories on the literary map of old Russia.'

Over seventy years later, there are still precious few histories and even fewer fictional accounts of that rural Catholic middle class like the O'Briens, who confidently expected to be the inheritors of the earth in a Home-Rule Ireland. Their world has rarely been evoked so sensitively as in this beguiling and most engaging narrative.

*Blurb credit to David Dickson