'Scintillating... Combines personal with political on a journey to the heart of Irish identity'
- Business Post
'A remarkably original, fluent and absorbing book, with the pace and twists of an enthralling novel and the edge of a fine sword, underpinned by a profound humaneness'
- Diarmaid Ferriter, Irish Times
'Our leading public intellectual has written the bible on incorrigible Irish roguery'
- Irish Independent
'Fintan is now routinely described as 'Ireland's leading public intellectual'... If we must have a hegemony, the best by a long way is the liberal kind. And to know how it happened here, this is the bible'
- Sunday Independent
'At heart, it's an investigation of the arrival of modernity in Ireland and just how much upheaval it caused'
- Herald
'Ireland's past is here painted by Fintan O'Toole mainly through villains, victims, eccentrics and scandals'
- BBC History Magazine
'An enthralling, panoramic book, a personal history of six decades of Irish life, from one of the foremost chroniclers of contemporary Ireland. With his customary deep erudition and sly wit, O'Toole weaves together an astonishing array of material... Jostling with anecdotes and arresting statistics, We Don't Know Ourselves is a feast: a deeply absorbing chronicle of the 'known and unknowable' and of the profound transformation of a place'
- Patrick Radden Keefe