Colm Connolly •
The Illustrated Life of Michael Collins •

Few people influenced the fate of 20th-century Ireland more profoundly than Michael Collins. And few have been more successful at evading the photographer’s lens.

For much of his political career, Collins was a wanted man. His unswerving, often bloody fight to free Ireland from British rule resulted in a price of 10,000 pounds being placed on his head. To avoid recognition and capture by the authorities, he mastered the art of hiding in plain sight. Dressed in an ordinary suit and tie, using a bicycle to get around, Collins was indistinguishable from thousands of other Dubliners. Even when attending a friend’s wedding, he would duck his head at the critical moment to avoid appearing full face in group photos.

So a pictorial biography of Collins is both an anomaly and a treasure. The Big Fellow, larger than life in intelligence, energy, and charisma, leaps off the pages of this moving collection. We also see the family homestead in Clonakilty; an elite hit squad known as the Twelve Apostles; Croke Park, site of the Bloody Sunday massacre; and Nancy O’Brien, the cousin who daringly used her work situation to smuggle British intelligence secrets to Collins. (His reaction: “How did these people hang onto their empire for so long and achieve so much, when they would put a cousin of mine in a job like that!”)

On August 22, 1922, Collins was ambushed and killed in his native County Cork, an occasion of “unutterable grief and loss” for the country he loved so passionately. An estimated half a million people—one-fifth of Ireland’s entire population—crowded the streets of Dublin to honor the fallen leader. Among the hundreds of floral tributes accompanying the funeral cortege, only one was placed on the coffin: a single white lily from Kitty Kiernan, Collins’s onetime fiancée.