Late in his fourth decade as a published author, Thomas Keneally has turned his well-honed techniques as a novelist to works of popular history. The first of them was The Great Shame (1998), his account of the Irish diaspora of the mid nineteenth century, especially to Australia and the United States. More recent was American Scoundrel (2002), his retelling of the story of the lawyer, politician, amorist, Civil War general, and much else besides, Daniel Sickles. Linking the two books is the vibrant figure of Thomas Meagher, an Irish political prisoner who escaped from Van Diemen's Land to make a new life in the United States as a Union general, governor of Montana, and finally victim of the Fenians. Keneally has always taken delight in such characters as these, real and imagined. Keneally's abiding interest in the American Civil War also generated his popular biography Abraham Lincoln (2003).

Since the 1960s...