From its first issue in 1859, The Irish Times was the newspaper of the Anglo-Irish, the 3,000 or so Protestant ascendancy families. Considered British in Ireland and Irish in Britain, many only felt at home on the Irish Sea. From 1922, with the establishment of the Irish Free State, it was a bastion of Protestant Ireland, along with the Bank of Ireland, Trinity College Dublin, the Royal Dublin Society and the Guinness brewery. Right up to the 1980s, every editor was a Protestant and Trinity College graduate. Terence Brown, himself a former professor of English at TCD, assesses its influence by chronicling the major episodes of the past 150 years as seen through its eyes. He shows The Irish Times reacting and commenting on events rather than influencing them, somewhat belying the book&rsqu