When introducing his short history, Ireland in the Twentieth Century, published in 1975, historian John A Murphy noted that “in the absence of both perspective and documentation, it is obvious that analysis and assessment can only be tentative” but also that “no Irishman writing about his own time can honestly claim to be academically remote from it all: he must try to be fair but he cannot escape feeling involved”. There was, nonetheless, something worthwhile in “combining contemporary observation with the analysis born of professional experience”.

Fourteen years later, his Cork colleague JJ Lee published his Ireland 1912-85: Politics and Society, considered a landmark publication. Lee’s book, now 30 years old, caused a great stir precisely because of the mix of contemporary observation and historical analysis. It was also, at 700 pages, a much weightier affair than was possible in the 1970s, because of what Lee referred to as “a massive expansion in the available archival material”, though he warned that such expansion could “obscure perspective beneath mounds of detail” and make the historian too complacent about “the enduring quality of necessarily provisional conclusions”.