The professor of Irish History at Oxford's St Patrick's Day op-ed for the New York Times was well timed to co-incide with the publication of his latest book, which shows a degree of marketing nous if nothing else.

Richard Eder reviews Roy Foster's latest contribution to the revision of the tangled mass that passes for history in Ireland. Eder highlights the literary focus of Foster's work which suggests the conflation of story and history is a peculiarly Irish trait:

''The elision of the personal and the national, the way history becomes a kind of scaled-up biography, and biography a microcosmic history, is a particularly Irish phenomenon,'' he writes. And, noting the 19th-century novel's contribution to a national sense in some countries, he points out that Ireland lacks any such formative exemplar: ''History — or historiography — is our true novel.''