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the process of national amnesia, by which the British people manage to forget their long relationship with Ireland (especially when it is still enmeshed in contemporary Northern Irish politics), might appear to threaten the chances of this biography reaching a wider audience. Also, however important a figure de Valera may be, his lanky, sombre frame, his dry, professorial language, his penchant for attending funerals, would seem to militate against his role as a suitable case for popular biographical treatment. Fortunately de Valera's life is in good hands: those of Owen Dudley Edwards whose literary style, insight and sheer exhuberance carry the reader irresistably, along. Dudley Edwards confronts a central problem for the biographer: how much is a biography merely an account of the 'life and times' of its subject, a piece of history seen through the perspective of an individual? What weight should be given to psychological factors? Where do the personal and the political intersect? How much introspection is allowable in the world of the politician, a world which does not on the whole cater for that quality? Dudley Edwards tackles these problems in two ways. He traces de Valera's lineage, his lack of a father's presence, his virtual abandonment by his mother, and relates these to de Valera's desire for acceptance and approval-a desire which he fulfilled in his chosen role as 'chieftain' of the Irish, or at least the southern Irish people, or at least the southern Irish Catholic people. And he emphasises the central place of de Valera's Catholicism not only in shaping his nationalism, but also in deciding his political role and style, de Valera was the priest of Irish nationalism, celebrating its mystical rituals before an audience of communicants; for, as T. S. Eliot has observed, the mass requires not only the participation of the priest who knows what he is doing, but also that of the congregation which knows what is being done. Hence de Valera's outrage against those who proved to be apostates against the faith and its celebrant: or, in other words, against the signatories of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. These personal qualities are convincingly related to de Valera's political life. His acceptance by the majority of the Irish people enabled him to enjoy a curiously detached, yet at the same time intimate relationship with his nation. And his personal embodiment of the Catholic nationalist tradition excluded him from the separated brethren in Ulster, a separation which he accepted readily enough. Owen Dudley Edwards has a sure touch when it comes to explaining and describing these delicate and intimate aspects of Irish politics. But he also succeeds in a much more difficult and complex task. Since the 1960s Irish history has undergone what might be called 'revisionism', as a generation of younger, no-nonsense scholars has peeled away the myths surrounding the Irish past. The problem is that this exercise can leave the reader wondering what all the fuss was about. If rational reappraisal is applied uncritically, then it runs the risk, not of explaining Irish history, but of explaining it away. To expose a myth is not the same thing as understanding it, and appreciating why the myth was born in the first place. Dudley Edwards is not of course befooled by the myths that surround de Valera; but neither does he leave the reader up in the air. For de Valera did have