Conor Cruise O'Brien

Arguably Conor Cruise O'Brien's most influential and admired book was this brilliant collection of essays - on history, literature and public affairs - first published in 1965. 'I can still remember the excitement with which I discovered a copy of Writers and Politics, in a provincial library in Devonshire thirty years ago. Nobody who tries to write about either of those subjects, or about "the bloody crossroads" where they have so often met, can disown a debt to the Cruiser.' Christopher Hitchens, London Review of Books'When a liberal can write such pieces as "Mercy and Mercenaries", "Journal de Combat", "Varieties of Anti-Communism", "A New Yorker Critic", and "Generation of Saints", an important voice has returned to our culture.' Raymond Williams, Guardian

In this historical analysis of Zionism and the state of Israel, a former diplomat writes sympathetically of the Jews' fierce resistance under siege to secure their nation, their heritage, and their future

Statesman, political thinker, orator, and ardent campaigner, Edmund Burke was one of the most brilliant figures of the eighteenth century. This unorthodox biography focuses on Burke's thoughts, responses, and actions to the great events and debates surrounding Britain's tumultuous relationships with her three colonies—America, Ireland, and India—and archrival France."In bringing Burke to our attention, Mr. O'Brien has brought back a lost treasure. The Great Melody is a brilliant work of narrative sweep and analytical depth. Conor Cruise O'Brien on Edmund Burke is a literary gift to political thought."—John Patrick Diggins, New York Times Book Review"Serious readers of history are in for a a book by the greatest living Irishman on the greatest Irishman who ever lived. . . . O'Brien's study is not merely a reconstruction of a fascinating man and period. It is also a tract for the times. . . . I cannot remember another time when I finished a book of more than 600 pages wishing it were longer."—Paul Johnson, The Independent" The Great Melody combines superb biography and fascinating history with a profound understanding of political philosophy."—Former President Richard Nixon

As controversial and explosive as it is elegant and learned, The Long Affair is Conor Cruise O'Brien's examination of Thomas Jefferson, as man and icon, through the critical lens of the French Revolution. O'Brien offers a provocative analysis of the supreme symbol of American history and political culture and challenges the traditional perceptions of both Jeffersonian history and the Jeffersonian legacy."The book is an attack on America's long affair with Jeffersonian ideology of radical an ideology that, by confusing Jefferson with a secular prophet, will destroy the United States from within."—David C. Ward, Boston Book Review"With his background as a politician and a diplomat, O'Brien brings a broad perspective to his effort to define Jefferson's beliefs through the prism of his attitudes toward France. . . . This is an important work that makes an essential contribution to the overall picture of Jefferson."— Booklist"O'Brien traces the roots of Jefferson's admiration for the revolution in France but notes that Jefferson's enthusiasm for France cooled in the 1790s, when French egalitarian ideals came to threaten the slave-based Southern economy that Jefferson supported."— Library Journal"In O'Brien's opinion, it's time that Americans face the fact that Jefferson, long seen as a champion of the 'wronged masses,' was a racist who should not be placed on a pedestal in an increasingly multicultural United States."— Boston Phoenix"O'Brien makes a well-argued revisionist contribution to the literature on Jefferson."— Kirkus Reviews"O'Brien is right on target . . . determined not to let the evasions and cover-ups continue."—Forrest McDonald, National Review" The Long Affair should be read by anyone interested in Jefferson—or in a good fight."—Richard Brookhiser, New York Times Book Review

Forty years ago Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote a small but brilliantly argued critique of Camus' work. In The Outsider, for example, amongst many things O'Brien notes is that a European in Algeria would not face the death penalty for the murder of an Arab. More fundamentally O'Brien takes issue with the allegorical value of the plague in La Peste. It is of course generally accepted that the disease is a metaphor for the Nazi occupation of France & Western Europe, however the impact of this metaphor collapses when one considers that Oran itself was occupied by the French colonialists--an irony which Camus seems blissfully unaware. In passing there is not a named Arab who is the victim of the plague. It's as if these deaths are of little value compared to the French occupiers.

There is a tragic inevitability about Irish history: "hatred answering hatred", as Lady Gregory wrote. Four events in particular, Yeats' "four deep, tragic notes", ring through Irish history: the Catholic revolt against Elizabeth; the battle of the Boyne, which established the Protestant Ascendancy; the impact of the French Revolution; and the fall from power of Charles Stewart Parnell, which turned Ireland away from peaceful solutions to its ills. The authors bring the story up to the present, then look ahead to the end of the century.

Written in 1972 in the wake of Bloody Sunday and direct rule, States of Ireland was Conor Cruise O'Brien's searching analysis of contemporary Irish part-memoir, part-history, part-polemic.'If The Great Melody (1992) is O'Brien's major academic work, States of Ireland is the one that will endure as a vital moment in Irish intellectual and political history.' Roy Foster, Standpoint' States of Ireland [is] a book which influenced a generation. [O'Brien] saw that partition, while scarcely desirable in itself, recognized the reality of two different communities in the island, and that the Dublin state's formal irredentist claim on Northern Ireland was undemocratic and even imperialistic, as well as insincere. The republican ideology to which most Irish people paid lip service was a shirt of Nessus, he later "it clings to us and burns".' Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Just before he died after a long and distinguished international career as a politician, commentator, and author, Conor Cruise O’Brien completed a study of George Washington’s presidency. Cruise O’Brien has been described as “a man who so persistently asks the right questions” (The Economist), and in this, his last book, he explores the question of how early America’s future was determined.First in Peace considers the dissension between Washington and Jefferson during the first U.S. presidency, and reveals Washington’s clear-sighted political wisdom while exposing Jefferson’s dangerous ideology. Cruise O’Brien makes the case that Washington, not Jefferson, was the true democrat, and commends his clarity of vision in restoring good relations with Britain, his preference for order and pragmatism, and his aversion to French political extremism.

Scholar and statesman Conor Cruise O'Brien illuminates why peace has been so elusive in Northern Ireland. He explains the conflation of religion and nation through Irish history into our own time. Using his life as a prism through which he interprets Ireland's past and present, O'Brien identifies case after case of the lethal mixing of God with country that has spilled oceans of blood throughout this century of nationalism and that, from Bosnia to Northern Ireland, still curses the world."O'Brien's bravura performance [is] seductive in its intellectual sweep and literary assurance."—Toby Barnard, Times Literary Supplement"Has the magical insistence which Conor Cruise O'Brien can produce at his best. . . . Where he looks back to his own childhood the book shines. He writes of his mother and father with effortless grace and candor, with a marvelous, elegant mix of affection and detachment."— Observer

Statesman, political thinker, orator and ardent campaigner, Edmund Burke was one of the greatest minds of the eighteenth century. His ideas and principles were expressed in the great debates over liberty, the rights of man and the American and French revolutions, and are among the most important in modern history. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s magisterial book is a rich and fascinating biography of an extraordinary man.

July 1960: The newly independent Congo is hit by the secession of its mineral rich-province Katanga, led by Mo�se Tshombe and backed by Belgium and Britain.June 1961: Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien arrives in Katanga as Special Representative of United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskj�ld, his task (under a UN resolution) to arrest and repatriate the mercenaries and foreign interests propping up Tshombe. The consequences of this mission will prove fateful for all parties.This is the story of how a brilliant Irish diplomat found himself in Africa amid one of history's maelstroms. O'Brien reconstructs the complex, tragic, sometimes comic events of a drama in which he found himself controversially at centre stage. The result is history from the inside: a valuable study of 'the game of nations', and of the UN's unique functioning and malfunctioning.

Conor Cruise O'Brien, respected journalist, diplomat and statesman, considers threats to the Enlightenment tradition from which modern society derives threats he considers serious enough that the tradition and its institutions might not survive even a third of the next millennium.

Known as a diplomat, government minister, historian, biographer, anti-war activist, playwright, editor, political theorist and university president, Conor Cruise O'Brien has brought his unique perspective to such thorny issues as Irish nationalism, Zionism, post-colonial Africa and India and terrorism. In this searching memoir O' Brien traces the forces that have shaped the past eighty years of his own life with clarity, power, passion and tender wit.

Light wear to DJ, dusty, Internally Like New.

In his usual witty style, Conor Cruise O’Brien illuminates the confusion and conflation of religion and nationalism throughout history, and the enormous tensions produced by interactions between the two. From Old Testament Canaan to Joan of Arc, from Puritan Massachusetts Bay to National Prayer Breakfasts, he points out the pitfalls awaiting any nation that begins to consider itself especially favored by God. Cruise O’Brien begins his history with the powerful nationalistic forces tied to religion in the Old Testament, which Jesus and St. Paul tried to divert to a more purely spiritual plane in the New Testament. In the Middle Ages, Christianity took on markedly nationalistic forms as homeland loyalities grew strong; by the fifteenth century the two forces were fused in Joan of Arc. With the Reformation and the development of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, a more literal approach to the Old Testament intensified nationalism in Britain and North America. Moving to the French Revolution, which led to the most dangerous form of “holy nationalism”, Cruise O’Brien examines how the nation itself became the object of a cult replacing the Christian God. And finally he relates how, in this century, Cardinal Spellman merged religion with patriotism in an anti-Communist crusade that sent Protestants into retreat and a Catholic into the White House.

From dust jacket flap: "In his preface to Murderous Angels ConorCruise O'Brien writes :'In 1967, while at work on a book on the ritual and dramatic workings of the United Nations – now published as United Nations: Sacred Drama, I found myself having to think again about the story of the United Nations operation in the Congo and to think about it in a new way, partly necessitated by a new theme, and partly by new information …. While I was preoccupied by these questions, I dreamt one night that a new notebook of Dag Hammarskjold's had been discovered which constituted a sort of political key or equivalent to the spiritual cogitations of Hammarskjold which have been published under the title Markings. In the dream I seemed not to have access to the new notebook. And was vaguely distressed by this.Puzzled by this dream, I began rather reluctantly to re-examine and re-interpret what I knew or guessed about fates of Hammarskjold and of Lumumba. Probably partly by the inherently dramatic nature of these intertwined fates, and partly because of "the sacred drama" thesis on which I was then working, I found it necessary to think in terms of a play….'The germ of Murderous Angels is the conception that Hammarskjold, for exalted and convincing reasons and in the service of humanity deliberately brings about the downfall and death of Patrice Lumumba, which in its turn precipitates his own downfall and death.''This dramatic theme is embroidered with a great deal of controversial material concerning the attitudes of the great powers involved in the first year of Congolese independence in which the author played such a prominent part. Plans are in hand for the production of Murderous Angels in the United States, with a possible production to follow in London.

This collection, published to mark the bicentennial of Burke's death, contains original explorations into the life, thought, and influence of one of the West's greatest statesmen and political philosophers.

The Suspecting Glance (first published in 1972) collects Conor Cruise O'Brien's four T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures as delivered at the University of Kent, Canterbury, in November 1969. The lectures were inspired by O'Brien's experience of holding the Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities at New York University from 1965-9, and there teaching students in whom he noted burning radical convictions but also a disconcerting 'lack of suspicion in those bright, young eyes'. Whereas to O'Brien's mind the 'suspecting glance' was a mark of political maturity that had to be first directed at one's own opinions prior to decrying another's.Brien's Eliot lectures were, as his friend Frank Callanan noted, a 'corrective gesture' toward his New York experience. In them he considers four writers - Machiavelli, Burke, Nietzsche, Yeats - whom he reads as being 'profoundly aware of the resource and versatility of violence and deception in man, in society, and in themselves'.

In Reflections on Political Violence (first published in 1978) Conor Cruise O'Brien collects a number of essays alongside three short plays that dramatise political arguments through the infamous figure of the Roman king of Judaea for whom the collection is named.'A great book. In it, O'Brien not only denounces IRA terrorism, as you would expect from a mainstream politician, but - in a sense quite different from the rationalisations offered by ideological apologists for political violence - seeks to understand it. I mean, really understand it - not extenuate it by equivocation and non sequitur. And his thinking leads him to attack the republican mythology at the heart of the Irish state. Few writers have analysed terrorism so acutely or been as effective in undermining its ideological justifications.' Oliver Kamm, from his preface to this edition

As a writer and politician, Conor Cruise O'Brien has been acclaimed for wit, candour and courage. And courage above all he has needed in the face of Irish political violence. He displays these qualities once again in this series of lectures on various aspects of British-lrish relations. The lectures are dedicated to the memory of Christopher Ewart-Biggs. the British Ambassador to Ireland, killed by I.R.A. terrorists in 1976. They are also dedicated to 'all the thousands of victims of political violence arising from this dispute in and over Irish and British people, Protestants, Catholics, agnostics-men, women and children'.Dr O'Brien's far-ranging analysis leads to painfully blunt conclusions. How to escape from the world of 'the possessed', from the 'dark and atavistic forces' represented by the terrorists? Salvation does not lie with the British Government, nor with the Government of the Republic, let alone with sympathizers in America. It lies with the people of the North, Catholic and Protestant. They must seize their chance and work out ways of living together in peace. The alternative is civil war and catastrophe.Ruthless in exposing humbug, rich in compassion, these lectures contain the political credo of one of the most distinguished Irishmen of today.

Book by O'Brien, Conor Cruise, etc.

Conor Cruise O'Brien's second book, published in 1957, grew out of the doctoral thesis he had submitted at Dublin's Trinity College that, in 1954, duly earned him his PhD. In Parnell and His Party, 1880-1890, O'Brien applied a finessing scholarly eye to the figure of Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party and formidable proponent of Home Rule whose career was abruptly ruined by the 'Mrs O'Shea' divorce scandal of 1890 that split his party and dominated Irish politics for a generation. For O'Brien this schism was of more than academic his maternal grandfather David Sheehy was among the MPs who repudiated Parnell.'An indispensable classic half a century after its first publication . . . a profound analysis of power and charisma in democratic politics.' Roy Foster, Standpoint'One of the essential books of modern Irish history, a shrewd and clarifying study.' Thomas Flanagan

A comprehensive and powerful account of the extraordinary events, from the accession of Louis XVI in 1774 to the triumph of Napoleon in 1802, that shook France and Europe to the core. As well as being an authoritative retelling of what took place in France – from the meeting of the States-General and the storming of the Bastille to the Terror, the Directory, and, ultimately, Napoleon and the expansion of a pan-European war – this will be a groundbreaking re-examination of the French Revolution’s legacy for Europe, America and the world.

C.C.O’Brien’s early writings contain the early on the mature, magisterial style and substance that have made him one of the finest political philosophers alive and active today. Edited with notes by Professor Edwards, this is the first collection of O’Brien’s precient discourses on Ireland, Ulster, diplomacy,the UNO ,the UN and Africa and more.

The first literary phase in the brilliant and protean career of Conor Cruise O'Brien was his work as critic for Dublin literary magazine The Bell, which begat this collection of essays first published in 1952 (under the pseudonym 'Donat O'Donnell', as O'Brien was then a working civil servant.) In it, O'Brien set himself to a study of 'the patterns of several exceptionally vivid imaginations which are permeated by Catholicism' - from Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh to Francois Mauriac and Paul Claudel - and to analyse 'what those patterns might share'. The originality and flair of Maria Cross won O'Brien many vocal admirers, among them Dag Hammarskjold, cerebral Secretary-General of the United Nations.'A most interesting and at times brilliant book, admirably and wittily written.'New Statesman'One of the most acute and stimulating books of literary criticism to be published for some years.' Spectator

O'Brien, Conor Cruise And Feliks Topolski, United Nations, Sacred Drama

Ensayos políticos, literarios, religiosos, internacionalistas y acerca del racismo, el autor es considerado digno sucesor de George Orwel. Irónicos, bien elaborados, representan un viento fresco en la ensayística inglesa.

An account of the authors adventures in three different yachts, the Kelpie, Saoirse and Ilen. He used the Kelpie, a 26 ton cutter, to smuggle arms into Ireland during the 'troubles'.