‘Philosophy and Passion’: W. B. Yeats, Ireland and Europe

R. F. Foster FBA, FRSL, FRHS, MRHA retires this year from the Carroll Chair of Irish History at Hertford College, in the University of Oxford, a post founded for him in 1991. His books include Charles Stewart Parnell: The Man and His Family (1976), Lord Randolph Churchill: A Political Life (1981), Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (1988), The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland (1989), The Sub Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue: Selected Essays of Hubert Butler (1990), Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (1993), The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (2001), W. B. Yeats, A Life. I: The Apprentice Mage 1865–1914 (1997) and II: The Arch-Poet, 1915–1939 (2003); Conquering England: The Irish in the Victorian Metropolis (2005), co-written with Fintan Cullen, Luck and the Irish: a brief history of change 1970–2000 (2006), Words Alone: Yeats and his inheritances (2011), derived from his Clark Lectures at the University of Cambridge; and Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland (2014), based on the Ford Lectures which he delivered at Oxford in 2012. He is also a well-known critic, reviewer and broadcaster. Email: Roy.Foster@hertford.ox.ac.uk