“I could have gone under the most advantageous conditions, and with the one thing I had been looking for – a fair chance to get ahead,” Michael Collins was reflecting in early 1922 on his decision not to take passage to New York eight years earlier, just before the start of the great war. The 24-year-old Collins had discovered that London held as little opportunity for an ambitious young Irish Catholic as the Ireland he had left at the age of seventeen. He had moved from his ‘blind alley’ position in the civil service to a minor post in a…

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