Churchill’s Man in Dublin

Giants leave footsteps in the sands of time. Many of the people whose lives intersected with Major General Sir Henry Hugh Tudor are well known: Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, Eamon de Valera, even Herbert Louis Samuel — all subjects of multiple biographies. Not so Tudor, himself a giant in the history of Ireland, the byways of India, and the battlefields of the Boer War and the First World War. To adapt a dance-hall tune that was revived by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem four years before Tudor’s death in 1965: Hugh, we hardly know ye.

Now, thanks to Linden MacIntyre, we do. In more than 300 pages of bristling combat, fierce police action, random violence, indiscriminate shootings, and metastasizing mayhem and madness, Tudor emerges as both perpetrator (of bedlam) and victim (of the precepts of empire that prevailed, and flourished, during the early decades of the last century). In the name of God and of the dead generations — if you permit the...