WOULD the ill-organised Irish of the 1930s have made good fascists? Could the country's anti-authoritarian streak be replaced with an obedient one? After being denied Home Rule for so long, would the Irish have succumbed to one-party rule? Yes, one group firmly believed, so firmly that they set up their home-grown organisation. The Army Comrades Association, or the Blueshirts as they came to be known, were set up to counter the violence at Cumann na nGaedheal (now Fine Gael) meetings by republicans. Well, that is what they argued, but there was something more sinister afoot. Ironically, it was their laughable performance fighting in Spain that exposed them for the tinpot soldiers they were. TW Chernobyl Strawberries: A Memoir By Vesna Goldsworthy Atlantic Books £8.00 311pps GOLDSWORTHY began writing this when she discovered she had breast cancer. The title comes from the explosion at the nuclear plant, the poison from which was carried by wind to her home near Belgrade and settled on the strawberries. A wry sense of humour runs through the book. For example, she explains pofaced, that ?the strawberries may or may not have been radioactive." She now works for the BBC in Britain and, reading between the lines, she is virtually stateless.

Although she married into an English family, she feels alienated, admitting she is caught between cultures, but yet fully belongs to neither. As with most educated Yugoslavs, she has a command of many languages, English being her third, but so fluent is the writing she could be mistaken for a native. TW

Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth Century Florence By Tim Parks Profile Books £9.00 273pps

NO BETTER boys than the Medicis to handle money and power. The art of the subtitle you can ignore, that's a myth. The Medici dynasty were into property; they didn't give a fart about art. Very quick thinking in tight spots and equally good at putting a spin on things. Their bank opened in 1397 and lasted less than 100 years. First the money ran out. Then the family ran out in 1494. They returned a few decades later under Habsburg protection and loaned out money at interest. The Vatican did not approve of such usury. Yet business with the Church was a lucrative affair. To get around this, they asked the Church would it be all right if the borrowers gave a tip or a gift on the final repayment of a loan? Angels dancing on pinheads, eh? TW

Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution By Kevin Booth Harper Collins £8.00 437pps

DEIFIED in Britain, ignored in his native US, Bill Hicks, it says in the blurbs, had the courage to say what other comics balked at; with the possible exception of Lenny Bruce. No one, no belief and no orthodoxy was sacred. Offstage he was a meditative character, polite, unassuming, ?seeking enlightenment". He tried ?to get there through books".

He also tried through drugs and women. The question uppermost with readers will not be why and how he died at the age of 32, but how he lasted that long. He seems to have spent most of his time in whorehouses.

He did cocaine, magic mushrooms, marijuana, heroin, mandrax. Every opportunity to overindulge in alcohol was availed of. It is stated that he hated authority, I don't think he liked himself all that much either. TW

If I Should Die Before I Wake By Michelle Morris Souvenir Press £9.00 197pps

MORRIS's novel, first published 24 years ago, opens with a young woman waiting by the bedside of her sleeping father. On her knee rests a police revolver.

She strokes the trigger. When the man wakes she is going to kill him for the years of sexual violence to which he has subjected her. The rest of the novel reveals the depths of degradation she has endured, the details of how her father destroyed her and, later in her life, how Dean, a friend she has made at school, helps her with an understanding this reader felt was beyond his years. A sometimes horrific read, but Michelle Morris is a social worker, so the horror is all too authentic.

The Gorbals Trilogy By Ralph Glasser Black & White £9.99

WHEN in the 1950s, Ralph Glasser found the Duke of York drunkenly falling onto him at a French casino he was attending with movie star Dennis Price, he must have been reminded of home. As described in his memoir, Growing Up In The Gorbals, Glasgow's most infamous district felt to its residents as if several circles of Dante's hell had been decanted into one Dickensian slum. This welcome omnibus collects together Glasser's three volumes of autobiography, which tell the remarkable story of how he escaped 1930s Glasgow for Oxford University. If he felt like an outsider at home, he was no more capable of blending in down south. Glasser's sketches of the Establishmentto-be are needle sharp. CW

Island On The Edge Of The World . . . The Story of St Kilda By Charles Maclean Canongate £6.99

THE first written description of St Kilda dates from 1380 and describes the island as ?on the margin of the world". Not only was it so remote as to often be left off maps, its sheer cliffs helped create the notion that one was ?on the edge of the world". In 1815, the inhabitants hadn't heard of Napoleon but were worried that the War of Independence with America might increase the cost of tobacco. When steamers brought the first tourists to its shores, St Kilda's fate was sealed. By the time its people were evacuated in 1930, they had neglected their own crops for tourist handouts. MacLean's book works both as a beguiling history and a pertinent reminder of what happens when a powerful civilisation imposes itself on a small band of indigenous people. CW