It is not everyday that you find a CBE in your sock drawer. But that’s what I came upon when I moved in to my late grandfather’s house in Co Kilkenny in 1999. ‘Commander of the Order of the British Empire’, it announced. I presented the medal to the tribal elder, with...
‘The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one's self to be acquainted with it’. A short account of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694 – 1773), British statesman, man of letters and arguably the...
A remarkable family, descended from a French Huguenot refugee whose grandson established the family at Ballinasloe in County Galway. Headed up by the Earl of Clancarty, its prominent figures include one of the architects of modern Europe after Napoleon's fall, a 20th...
