Memoir: The personal recollections of the youngest of Eamon de Valera's sons, Terry, add considerably to our understanding of one of Ireland's leading figures of the 20th century, and offer many valuable footnotes to our knowledge and understanding of recent Irish history.
But, to someone like myself, of the same generation and sharing a similar, albeit politically differentiated background, it is also a nostalgic read - for what he recalls from the first half of the last century are precisely those memories that have stuck in my mind. Let me list just some of them:
Having Dickens read aloud by a parent - in his case his mother, in mine my father. Attending the Eucharistic Congress. Enthusiasm for aviation sparked off by the Cobham air circus. Playing charades at home with the family (although I have no memory quite as striking as his, of his father crawling into the drawing-room adorned by antlers in an unsuccessful attempt to illustrate a word). Personal incapacity for rugby. Being helped with maths by a father - in his case one better-equipped for the task than mine. Gilbert and Sullivan operas at school. Visiting the Schleswig Holstein off Dun Laoghaire less than two months before it launched the second World War by shelling Danzig. Listening as a family to the British declaration of war. Joining the LDF. Watching the same air battle over Dublin between British and German planes. Visiting the making of Henry V in Powerscourt. The day the War ended.
Because of the change of government in 1932, however, Terry saw less of his father in childhood, and I saw more of mine. In both our cases our mothers were strong influences. But it is clear from his account, and especially from his mother's own essay in autobiography (memories which, happily, he persuaded her to commit to paper) that, although she was an early participant in the language movement, after marriage her role became primarily domestic, whilst my mother was a prime mover in political matters.
In 1916, while Mabel FitzGerald was actively engaged in the preparations for the Rising, and had to be sent home from the GPO by Pearse to look after my elder brothers in Bray, Sinéad de Valera was sheltered from these events by a protective husband, who told her nothing whatever of what was impending.
Our mothers were, however, united in one matter: they both spontaneously opposed the Treaty - a development that contributed to harmony in the de Valera household but, I later heard from an elder brother, to marked disharmony in ours. And, despite their stance on the Treaty, they shared an extraordinarily warm regard for Michael Collins, who had cared for the de Valera family when their father was absent in the US in 1919-1920. It is very moving to read Sinéad de Valera's account of seven-year-old Brian's anxious question after Collins's death: "Did Mick know I wasn't a Free Stater?"
Sinéad de Valera described how their marriage ceremony was performed in Irish by a priest who was clearly unfamiliar with the language, as a result of which "he married us three or four times before he got the words right!" And when, as they set up house, she sent Eamon to buy some "basic and essential fittings", he returned with a patched cello, two copper plates painted with rural scenes, and a huge brass chandelier that reached to the floor. He probably wasn't asked to do much shopping after that. Was this, perhaps, an early instance of his reputed Machiavellianism?
There are some interesting historical sidelights. Although, after the Rising in 1916, Sinéad arranged for his US birth certificate to be brought to the American Consul, and also visited him herself, he subsequently did not want to believe that this saved his life.
And Terry makes it clear that when, in the early 1930s, there was a Blueshirt march on Dublin, his father believed the reports he received that a coup was being contemplated.
But most of Terry's historical memories relate to the second World War. His own bedroom was "a veritable arsenal", and he recalls a secret room being constructed in their Cross Avenue house where, presumably, de Valera might hide in the event of a successful invasion.
On Christmas Eve 1940, his father told him that he feared an imminent British invasion, and, after checking with him that the radio transmitter in the attic was operational, instructed him to take next day a mysterious brown paper parcel - allegedly containing two bottles of whiskey - to his brother Vivion, then an army captain stationed in Greystones, who had instructions in the event of invasion to arrest, and apparently to execute, a British spy in the locality. Even after the war, neither his father nor Vivion would ever explain to him what was really in the parcel, although Vivion eventually told him that if the invasion had taken place, his parents would have left, despite the secret room, and that he would have had to stay behind with the radio transmitter.
As for the message from Churchill on the night of Pearl Harbour, "Now or never. A nation once again", Terry's account makes it clear that, from what the British Representative, Sir John Maffey, had told his father when he called at the house, Churchill (perhaps understandably in the circumstances) was intoxicated when he rang Maffey at a late hour in the night. Eamon de Valera was not impressed by what he saw as an alcohol-induced message.
But, as Terry himself records, in the context of the 1953 Downing Street dinner given by Churchill for Eamon de Valera, "man-to-man they had considerable mutual respect". However, Terry himself does not seem to agree with his father on this, for, in the context of the War, he sees Churchill as having been concerned "simply to satisfy his own selfish imperial aims and personal lust for power" - which seems an odd verdict on the man who saved Europe, including Ireland, from Nazism. There is, in fact, no sign in the book of any awareness on its author's part of the extent to which his father had authorised close wartime co-operation with the British, despite our nominal neutrality.
There are brief insights on how de Valera viewed some of his Ministers. We are told that he had a special affection for Sean McEntee, who, as Minister for Finance, was known in Cabinet as "The Leader of the Opposition". Terry himself found Lemass "charming but a little difficult and, like Frank Aiken, prone to contradiction and argument".
The book is one of recollections rather than based on research, which explains some odd errors - such as the suggestion that his father's absence from the family in the first two years of the author's life was because he was in the US, when, in fact, during that period, he was on the run, or imprisoned by the Cumann na nGaedheal Government.
He also confuses the Rhineland, which German troops re-occupied in 1936, with Alsace and Lorraine, and Kenmare with Bandon, and he has the European War ending on May 5th, 1945, instead of the 7th or 8th - depending on your reckoning. But these are minor faults in a book which offers fresh and intimate insights into a major Irish historical figure.
• Garret FitzGerald is an author and a former taoiseach