Alfie

Trevor White brings [Alfie Byrne] vividly to life in the pages of his elegant new biography -- Leo Varadkar * Sunday Independent * Hugely entertaining ... This is the first proper account of his life, and it's bolstered by White's access to Byrne's family papers -- Damian Corless * Irish Independent * Peppered with delectable anecdotes ... Well researched and spryly written, this is an elegant account of one of our capital city's half-forgotten sons -- John Walshe * Sunday Business Post * White has found a deliciously rich seam to mine in Alfie Byrne ... Byrne's Dublin is revived in glorious Technicolor, and with much affection. It's a lively, boisterous, contradictory, occasionally maddening place, Much like the man himself, really. -- Tanya Sweeney * Irish Times * Alfie could easily have been a sentimental rags-to-riches story about the son of a docker who escaped Sean O'Casey's long haggard corridors of rottenness and ruin to become a minor power broker among the bankers and lawyers while living in a Dublin 6 pile. Instead, White , who admires his quarry, doesn't pull punches when it comes to describing how the career of the genial Byrne eventually lost steam. -- Tom Mooney * Sunday Times * Brilliantly told ... an inimitable portrait of Dublin for the forty-two years, 1914-56, that Alfie dominated the political scene -- Bridget Hourican * Cara * This enormously enjoyable biography doesn't seek to canonise Alfie, or to demonise him. It does what all good biographies should, which is simply to tell us the protagonist's true story; and it does what all great biographies should do, which is to make that story a delight to read * Irish Daily Mail * Trevor White has done today's citizenry some service in providing us with a balanced and well-researched account of the phenomenon that was Dublin's own Alfie Byrne -- Tom Wall * Dublin Review of Books * Now at last this very representative Dubliner has got an ideal biographer ... amusing, instructive and insightful * Irish Catholic *