Her mother, who wrote vivid versions of old Irish folk tales, once said of the Irish Civil War: 'In those days... fear kept you from sleeping, but also from getting fat or bored.'

Her father was Director of Publicity for the IRA during that savage conflict. He made bombs.

A brilliant writer, his first book of stories was banned and he was summoned by his old IRA comrades to be court-martialled for writing it. He became one of Ireland's most celebrated writers and a radical dissident during the 1940s, challenging Church and State for their betrayal of the people's needs. His affairs with Elizabeth Bowen and many other women were betrayals of a more intimate kind.

This was the backdrop to Julia O'Faolain's childhood. Her life is filled with great characters: Frank O'Connor, Paul Henry, Garret Fitzgerald, Hubert Butler, Patrick Kavanagh and Richard Ellman; and later, in their villas outside Florence, Harold Acton and Violet Trefusis, along with a cast of prim communists and raffish reactionary aristocrats.