The Historical Association of Ireland and University College Dublin Press have recently renewed the Life and Times Series with a fresh selection of biographies, to date including titles on Thomas Kettle, Denis Guiney and John Mitchel. James Quinn's contribution to the series is a brief but entertaining and impressively researched revision of the main episodes in Mitchel's life: his recruitment to the staff of the Nation in 1845, his increasing differ�ences with other Young Ireland leaders, his trial and transportation to Tasmania in 1848, his escape to the U.S. in 1853, his controversial career as an advocate of slavery and the Confederate cause, his brief connection with the Fenian movement, and, finally, his election for County Tipperary a few weeks before his death in March 1875. While this sequence of events may be familiar to the scholar of Irish nationalism, Quinn fleshes it out with new information gathered from research at the N.L.I., P.R.O.N.I., the Belfast Central Library, the Royal Irish Academy and the National Archives at Kew, among others. This array of primary sources alone makes Quinn's biography well worth examining.