Step on up to the Blarney Stone, and prepare to hear the tale of a small island nation where the people are poor, but happy; politically oppressed, but morally superior; unschooled but blessed with a gift of the gab that makes them the envy of the world.
It’s a land where green begets green, where memory, history, and fiction are woven into the same yarn. And that’s just the yarn historian Roy Foster aims to cut. He’s a revisionist who’s reviled for his views on the Great Potato Famine, an Irishman who’s not afraid to say he likes the English.
He argues Irish history needs to grow up and out of its mythology, and embrace a more complicated, less complacent version of itself. Roy Foster on telling tales and making history in Ireland.
Guests:
Roy Foster, author, “The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland”