The Damnable Question - A Study In Anglo-Irish Relations

The Damnable Question – A Study in Anglo-Irish Relations (1976)
George Dangerfield
Quartet Books
ISBN: 0704332523
Condition: Good
As sold by Crappy Old Books

Some historical topics come with neat edges, tidy timelines, and the reassuring sense that everyone eventually agreed. Anglo-Irish relations are not one of them. George Dangerfield’s The Damnable Question does not so much open a debate as stride into it, hat tilted, eyebrows raised, and say, “Right then — let’s untangle this properly.”

Dangerfield, best known for The Strange Death of Liberal England, brings the same sharp, slightly theatrical prose to this exploration of Britain and Ireland’s long, complicated entanglement. This is not a dry recital of treaties and dates. It is history with pulse — politics with personalities — argument delivered with literary flair. You can practically hear the parliamentary benches creaking.

The “damnable question” of the title is less a single issue and more a centuries-long knot of sovereignty, identity, religion, reform, rebellion, and the persistent British habit of thinking things will calm down if discussed at sufficient length. Spoiler: they did not.

What makes this book endure is its tone. Dangerfield writes with authority but also with narrative energy. He understands that constitutional crises are, at heart, human dramas. Statesmen posture. Movements fracture. Compromises are struck. Compromises collapse. And through it all, the relationship lurches forward — never simple, rarely calm.

The 1976 Quartet edition has that particular mid-70s academic aesthetic: serious cover, bold typography, and the faint sense that it might have been purchased by someone who intended to read it cover to cover over a winter term and then got distracted by events.

Condition is Good. It shows the honest signs of having lived on a shelf rather than in a museum case — light wear, firm binding, entirely readable. A book that has likely been consulted, perhaps debated, possibly underlined with conviction.

Ideal for:

• Readers of modern British and Irish political history

• Collectors of George Dangerfield

• Anyone who enjoys history that reads like unfolding drama

• Those who prefer their constitutional crises served with style

Available now from Crappy Old Books, where even the most “damnable” questions eventually find a place on the shelf.

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