Redmond O'Hanlon is the best and least known of Irish highwaymen. Only seven years of his life are documented: from 1674, when he was proclaimed an outlaw, to 1681, when he died. The rest belongs in the realm of fiction: stories, folktales, songs, and ballads. This gives the novelist free rein to indulge his imagination. In O'Hanlon novelist Ron Duffy has added to the fiction that has collected round the name of O'Hanlon. In doing so has created a resourceful Robin-Hood figure, who, at the age of twenty, is swept up in the Irish Rebellion of 1641. The aim of the Rebellion is to win religious...

A few weeks before he was assassinated in 1947, Gandhi handed his grandson Arun a list of 'Seven Blunders, ' out of which, Gandhi claimed, springs the violence of crime, rebellion, and war that plagues the world. He considered these 'Seven Blunders of the World' as dangerous to humanity, as 'disbalances' that will kill us. In this book Ron Duffy picks up on Ghandi's idea but replaces Ghandi's Seven Blunders with what he calls Seven Social Evils which have arisen in modern times and left to continue unchecked will eventually-and he does not doubt it-create a world that is unfit for human life....