Book Title:White Elephants, The Country House and the State in Independent Ireland, 1922-73 ISBN-13:9781910820285 Author:Emer Crooke Publisher:University College Dublin Press Guideline Price:€40.00In 1882 Mark Twain presented a stark warning as to how ruinous white elephants could be in his short story The Stolen White Elephant. But there is a wider story to be told in Emer Crooke’s absorbing chronicle of how the country house fared in Ireland between 1922 and 1973. Moylan’s chilling condemnation of country houses in 1944 was uttered from a self-confessed “unregenerate point of view”. Nowadays, as Crooke has so ably demonstrated, it is possible to detach that negative prefix and welcome the regeneration of the country house in Ireland. Christopher Ridgway is curator of Castle Howard and co-editor of The Irish Country House: Its Past, Present and Future

Source: The Irish Times January 05, 2019 06:00 UTC