Dublin

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Europe's most westerly capital city was established by invaders and was for most of its history the locus of colonial administration, the engine room of foreign power and a major site of indigenous resistance. From The Act of Union through nineteenth-century decline and into the early years of Irish independence it was a city identified with poverty, dirt and decaying splendour. The Celtic Tiger produced sweeping changes, including massive new building projects, and the surprising revelation that Dublin has become fashionable. Two particular dates dominate popular imaginings of Dublin: 16 June 1904 when James Joyce and Nora Barnacle first "walked out" together; and Easter Monday 1916, when Pearse and Connolly led a small force against the British and began the struggle that led through civil war to independence for part of Ireland. Siobhan Kilfeather finds the legacy of the past undergoing a series of transformations in the vibrant atmosphere of contemporary Dublin.

CITY OF LITERATURE, VISUAL ARTS AND MUSIC: Swift, Burke, Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Bowen, Kavanagh and Edna O'Brien; the eighteenth-century buildings of Gandon and Pearce, and the Temple Bar Redevelopment; the films of John Ford and Neil Jordan; street singers, pub music, boy bands: Sinead O'Connor, U2, Louis Stewart, Gerald Barry, The Dubliners, The Pogues and The Point.

CITY OF COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION, VIOLENCE AND RESISTANCE: Medieval settlement, Dublin Castle, the Irish parliament, the risings of 1798, 1803, 1848 and 1916, the civil war, the emergency, and the 1974 Dublin bombings.

CITY OF WOMEN: Stella and Vanessa, Peg Woffington, Anne Devlin, Speranza, Constance Markievicz, Maud Gonne, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Caitlin Maude, Siobhan McKenna, Nell McCafferty and Mary Robinson.