Vivid Faces by RF Foster, review: 'thronged with personalities' The hearts of these men and women had "one purpose alone": yet a plethora of visions and ideologies was nevertheless in play, as one generation sought to overthrow the pieties of their parents and replace them with freedom from British governance. The shape this freedom was to take, however, remained far from clear, even in the minds of those who might have been assumed to hold shared views on the future. The result of this mixture of debate, dreaming and planning was a rich stew of confusion, a clash of many conflicting visions of where Ireland should be, and how it should get there. There was no unified culture in Ireland: and no sense of how such a culture might be created. Thus we trace the activities of socialists, Quakers and feminists, fervent, mystical Roman Catholics, homosexual men and women, and the gentry, all engaged in - as Foster's thematic chapter headings indicate - learning, playing, loving, writing and fighting, and a good deal more. The book ranges across the landscape of Ireland - but the intimate world of Dublin in those fluid times is evoked with especial psychogeographic care: one might wander the grey, gossip-drenched streets of the Irish capital, Foster suggests, from vegetarian restaurant to drama group and on to the meeting of a feminist collective, and in the process encounter as many aspects of human life as one could take in in the course of a single afternoon. The nod to Joyce, and to the streets of Dublin recreated in exile, is clear. Traditional histories of these years have tended, inevitably, to frame a selection of personalities in gendered and heroic terms: their humanity is overlooked in favour of great speeches and general swashbuckling; and later events such as the dreadful internecine strife of the Irish Civil War of 1922-23 are skated over, as being too alarming - and potentially destabilising to an infant nation - to study in any great detail. More recent archival study has corrected this balance: Foster's achievement is to bring together much of this material and amplify it, a cacophonous range of voices declaring their interest in literature, drama, sex and guns. Some of the figures in Vivid Faces - Roger Casement, Constance Markievicz, Patrick Pearse - are relatively well remembered today. Others are less so: and the book provides ample examples of the stakes held in this story by such women as Kathleen Lynn, doctor, suffragist and socialist, and her Maltese-born partner Madeleine Ffrench-Mullen; and shows too how educated, articulate women found little available room on the political stage in the aftermath of Irish independence. Many such figures carved out humanitarian spaces for themselves, while railing at the form of the new Irish Free State which had set hard around them - a new society which was essentially narrow, censorious, decidedly unrevolutionary and, as Yeats wrote, too engaged in "groping for halfpence in a greasy till" to create the world imagined by some members of an extraordinary activist generation. As the centenary of the Rising approaches - with much energy spent discussing in sterile terms whether it ought to have happened in the first place - it is a relief to read such a study, which takes for granted that the world is incorrigibly plural, and which immerses itself in the stuff of passionate human histories. The Story of Ireland, by Neil Hegarty, is published by BBC Books Vivid Faces by RF Foster 496pp, Allen Lane, Telegraph offer price: £18 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) (RRP £20, ebook £10.79).