Rebellious ferment: a Dublin musical memoir and diary

Brian Boydell's memoir, together with extracts from the diary he kept for part of 1950, have been edited by his son Barra Boydell, who established his own career as a prominent musicologist and a professor of music at Maynooth University.

Informative, entertaining and written with an engaging combination of passion and elegance, this is a highly readable book.

It presents a vivid portrait not only of artistic life (including painting, poetry and theatre as well as music) but also of politics, religion, infrastructure, education and society in mid-20th-century Ireland.

Brian Boydell presents a captivating account of his engagement with a wide range of often colourful people, including those associated with the White Stag Group in the early 1940s, and the European musicians who settled in Ireland and contributed so much to Irish musical life from the late 1940s.