The seeds of books germinate in both well-lit and shadowy imaginative spaces. In this way, books exhibit an affinity with the dreams Sigmund Freud studied in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), where he learned that identifying the “background thoughts” from which dream symbols emerge, particularly those intricate or bizarre images resistant to quick explanation, was hardly a simple task. The search for their origins led him to free association, a process in which a patient focuses on specific images, not on a complete dream narrative, and to the conclusion that “interpretation en detail and not en masse” better enables an investigator to uncover the overdetermined nature of dream images—their provenance in several sources, not just one. Like dreams, books often arise from an untidy jumble of places: an archive of prior cultural texts (scrivened, visual, aural); major social, scientific and historical developments; and the imprints of individual experiences, large and small, etched on a writer's memory. Some of these are transformative or, in the worst of cases, traumatic—a stunning success or mortifying failure, a once-in-a-century pandemic and a pitched medical battle to vanquish it—while others are tethered to the banalities of everyday life that, surprisingly, demand expression. Such is the case with From the “Troubles” to Trumpism.

As a student of Irish history and culture for over forty years, I have enjoyed numerous opportunities to visit Ireland and Northern Ireland, and written about both, most often discussing literature, drama and theatrical production. This engagement constitutes one source of the pages that follow but, again, there are others. One in particular motivates the political bristle of this book: recent socio-political discord in America, particularly that associated with the presidential election of 2020, the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the shocking state of affairs (and indictments) prefatory to the 2024 elections.