Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber
The Extraordinary Life of Rose Dugdale
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
'Fascinating . . . O'Driscoll's research is impressive' Ben Macintyre, The Times
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The story behind the hit movie Baltimore, starring Imogen Poots.
The astonishing story of the English heiress who devoted her life to the IRA.
She grew up in a Chelsea townhouse and on a Devon estate.
She was presented to the Queen at Buckingham Palace as a debutante in 1958.
She trained at Oxford as an academic economist and had a love affair with a female professor (who was on the rebound from Iris Murdoch).
At thirty, she commenced giving her inheritance away to the poor.
In 1972, the deadliest year of the Northern Irish Troubles, she travelled to Ireland and joined the IRA.
Sean O'Driscoll's Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber tells the astonishing story of Rose Dugdale, who went on to become a committed terrorist, participating in a major art heist and a bombing raid on a police and army barracks; who kept a pregnancy secret for nine months in prison and gave birth there; and who ended up at the heart of the IRA's bomb-making operation during its deadly final spasms in the 1990s. Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber is both the page-turning biography of a remarkable woman and a groundbreaking account of the inner workings of a terrorist organization.
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'It would be hard to overstate how good this book is . . . a fantastic read' Sunday Independent
'Superb . . . an even-handed and thrilling gallop through [Dugdale's] improbable life' Daily Telegraph
'Excellent' Michael McDowell, Irish Times
'Possibly the most extraordinary book you'll read this year' Irish Examiner
'Jaw-dropping' Joe Duffy
'Well-researched' Irish Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Irish journalist and lawyer O'Driscoll (The Accidental Spy) writes in this rigorous biography that English aristocrat–turned–Irish revolutionary Rose Dugdale has two sides: "extraordinarily generous and... disturbingly brutal." Born in 1941 to a millionaire underwriter for Lloyd's of London, Dugdale was a reluctant debutante in 1958. She left home to attend Oxford University, and received a doctorate in economics from the University of London. The global left-wing protests of 1968 shaped her views, leading her to volunteer for the Irish Republican Army and eventually become a bomb-maker. After taking part in an IRA raid to steal valuable art from an Irish mansion (in hopes of bartering the art for the freedom of incarcerated IRA members), she was sentenced to nine years in prison. After her release, she found purpose as an anti-drug crusader in Dublin, where she still lives. Drawing on interviews with Dugdale and her colleagues, O'Driscoll captures his subject's complexities (Dugdale " the energy of someone who was very kind to children, to animals and to the poor, but... showed little empathy for anyone she regarded as being on the wrong side of class politics") and gives a thorough behind-the-scenes report of the era's radical political milieu and its operational procedures (bomb-making gets a detailed treatment). The result is an engrossing window into the history of the Troubles.
