'After his masterpieces on Germany and England, James Hawes has done it again... a wonder to behold' PROFESSOR CIARAN MARTIN From the Ice Age to the present, here is the real story of Ireland. In The Shortest History of Ireland, James Hawes turns his attention to Ireland, reaching beyond the clichés to tell a dramatic new story, backed up by the latest scholarship. Irish history is often seen as a mere catalogue of colonial repression. Yet Hawes shows that Ireland, its unique culture rooted in millennia of continuity, has always been able to assimilate would-be invaders. He reveals how the Irish, ever since the roaming saints and scholars of the early Middle Ages, helped shape Europe, then America. And he argues that, with its natural wealth, its extraordinary magnetism and its exiled children across the globe, the island only needs to sidestep the last, toxic wreckage of the British Empire for its turbulent past to flow into a bright future. With 100s of maps and images, this is popular history at its best -- a timeless drama of freedom and persecution, riot and revolution, empire and independence.