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Reform, Revolution and Reaction: Archbishop John Thomas Troy and the Catholic Church in Ireland 1787-1817. By Vincent J. McNally. (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. 1995. Pp. xi, 256. $36.50.) Some members of the nineteenth-century Irish episcopal bench are, in view of the sources relating to them, unlikely ever to attract a biographer. Regrettably even the great John MacHale is in this category. Others very worthy of attention, like Daniel Murray, have hitherto failed to find a biographer. Paul Cullen, treated by Desmond Bowen, found the wrong one and was unreasonably attacked. One, therefore, records some pleasure that Vincent McNally's doctoral research on John Thomas Troy has, at length, come to published form. Troy has certainly found a writer with that basic requirement of the biographer-a sympathy for his subject. Also in...