Brian Igoe: 28 books

"To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything." So wrote Otto Lilienthal, the man who inspired the Wright brothers. "To Fly is Everything" is a compendium of stories about flying adventures of a father and son, the father in the RAF and...

"To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything."  So wrote Otto Lilienthal, the man who inspired the Wright brothers. "To Fly is Everything" is a compendium of stories about flying adventures of a father and son, the father in the RAF and...

This is a LiteBite Book, about the equal of fifty or so pages of a Paperback or Pocket Book. The Story of Ireland ‒ Book One. Roots. This is the first in a series of LiteBite Books telling the story of Ireland. This first Book takes us from 3000 BC to 1366 AD. The series aims to tell...

This is the story of Ireland – not just her History, but her story. Her Music, her Poetry and Theatre, her ancient Brehon laws. How people lived in the times of Brian Boru, what they wore and what they ate and drank. It’s the story of her roads, her railways, her canals. It’s the story of her...

This is the story of Ireland – not just her History, but her story. Her Music, her Poetry and Theatre, her ancient Brehon laws. How people lived in the times of Brian Boru, what they wore and what they ate and drank. It’s the story of her roads, her railways, her canals. It’s the story of her...

A short glimpse into some selected Irish Lives, from St Patrick to Grattan, to celebrate St Patrick's Day. These are two or three page 'potted' biographies of two Saints (Saints Patrick and Colmcille), a great King (Brian Boru), a great Earl (Gareth Fitzgerald, 8th Earl of Kildare),...

The man known to History as Charles Bianconi, and in his lifetime known as the King of the Irish Roads, was born Carlo Bianconi in Lombardy, Italy, in 1786. When he was 16, although his family were well off, he was apprenticed to a seller of prints who was going to England - chiefly to remove him...

Daniel O'Connell had an exciting life, spiced with duelling, Revolution, and girls galore until his marriage. That marriage astonishingly for the times, was a love match, far from the norm in those days. Dan was born in 1785 into the family of what was really a smuggler baron. At the age of 15 he...

This is a Litebite Book, about 6,000 words long. The Great Famine which afflicted Ireland between 1846 and 1851 is perhaps the most studied, the most commented upon, the most reviled, and yet the most formative event in modern Irish History. Many books have been written about the famine, most recently...

This is the fourth in the series of LiteBite Books telling the story of Ireland. It covers the time of the Nineteenth Century, to my mind one of the most stimulating times in Ireland’s history. The Great Famine was not in itself, of course, stimulating, but it’s results were surprising. The title...

This is the story of Zimbabwe - told as a series of dramatized adventures interspersed with just a little history. It covers the period from around 1000 AD to the current year, 2013. It is told in three parts. The first Part, Zambezia, takes us to around 1900, and follows the the Bantu tribes...

This is the second in the Daniel O’Connell series of LiteBite Books. It takes us from the end of the last book in 1800, which was the year of the Act of Union between England and Ireland, to 1828 when at the famous Clare Election he was elected to Parliament. That election was the culmination of...

This book is written as a novel. It is based on the life of John Boyle O'Reilly, not perhaps as well known as it deserves to be, in Ireland at any rate. He was born in 1844 in Drogheda, and died in Hull, Massachusetts USA in 1890, of an accidental overdose of his wife's sleeping pills. He was a writer,...

Oliver Cromwell has been the subject of books, learned journals, less learned articles, TV and radio programmes, countless times. He has had proponents and opponents. He has been revered and reviled, but far too seldom has he been understood. Perhaps the most scholarly of recent books on the subject...