Bainville, Jacques. Dictators. Translated from the French by J. Lewis May. London, Jonathan Cape, 1940. 20 x 14 cm. 268 pages. Original green cloth with silver titles and decorations. Very good condition. Some shelf wear, rubbing and bumping. Spine faded. Edges and end papers dust dulled. Name of previous onwer (‘Michael Tierney’) on half title page. Internally clean. The Life and Letters Series No. 96.

From the library of Michael Tierney, with his signature in pencil on half title page.
Michael Tierney (1894 – 1975) was Professor of Greek at University College Dublin (UCD) from 1923 to 1947 and President of UCD between 1947 and 1964 and was also a Cumann na nGaedheal politician.
Tierney was born in 1894 in the townland of Esker, near Castleblakeney, County Galway, the son of a farmer. He attended St Joseph’s College, Ballinasloe, and entered UCD in October 1911. He graduated in 1914 with a first-class honours degree in Ancient Classics. Two years later he was awarded his MA degree, and he worked as an assistant lecturer in Greek from 1918 to 1919 and 1920 to 1922. In 1917 he won a National University of Ireland (NUI) travelling studentship in Classics and used it to study in the Sorbonne, British School at Athens, and Berlin from 1919 to 1921. He was appointed to the Chair of Greek in 1922.
Tierney was elected a Cumann na nGaedheal Teachta Dála (TD) for Mayo North in a by-election in 1925 and for the NUI constituency in 1927, a seat he held until 1932.
He was an early member of the Army Comrades Association (later known as the Blueshirts) and, along with Ernest Blythe, encouraged Eoin O’Duffy to become the leader. Tierney suggested the name “Fine Gael” for the new coalition between his party, the Centre Party and the Blueshirts. He was a member of Seanad Éireann from 1938 to 1944.
Although Michael Tierney became famous as a controversial, reforming president of UCD, he had been a ubiquitous figure in Irish national politics for over twenty years before. A radical member of Cumann na nGaedheal and a key intellectual influence on the early Fine Gael party, he reinvented himself as a political independent, and campaigned for a vocational model of government in Ireland in line with papal teaching. He was that rarity in Irish politics – a political conservative who was also a public intellectual, and who tried to build a political career based on the quality of his ideas rather than tribal loyalties (Wikipedia et al).

• Keywords: Biography & Literary Criticism · Europe · History · History & Culture · Modern Literature · Politics · Reference
• Inventory Number: 102594AB

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