Great Irish Heroes by Danny Conlon and Alan Barter. John Blake Publishing; £7.99

THE rousing cover picture of Michael Collins, fists clenched and in full flight, sets the tone of Great Irish Heroes, a lively collection of stories of men and women whose names have reverberated through the pages of history.

While many are household personalities, others are less well known and some reflect our penchant to claim either the famous or notorious as Irish once their roots can be traced back to the ‘ould sod’. The collaborative work of Danny Conlon and Alan Barter, this is a page-turning read, crammed with action-packed pen pictures.

Besides retelling the events that led up to the untimely death of Collins, the book includes such heroes as: John Barry — after emigrating from Wexford at 21, he became the father of the US navy; Billy the Kid — his mother was Irish; Tipperary-born Brendan Bracken — the closest aide to Winston Churchill during World War II; tenor John McCormack; and US President Teddy Roosevelt, who traced his roots to Antrim.

Curiously, only two women make the 26-strong list — Mayo’s legendary pirate queen, Granuaile (Gráinne Ní Mhaille), who earned both the respect and friendship of Queen Elizabeth I, and Eliza Alicia Lynch who, having survived the famine in Co Cork, went on to become one of the wealthiest women in the world as consort of the President of Paraguay in the mid-1800s.

Aptly enough, three groups are deemed to warrant heroic status — the inhabitants of the Great Blasket Island, the Irish who died in the Spanish Civil War and the forgotten dead of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.

Casting a wide net, the illustrations include guitarist Rory Gallagher, singers Enya and Phil Coulter, poet WB Yeats, writer James Joyce, film-maker Neil Jordan, soccer stars Liam Brady and George Best, rebel leaders Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone, Padraig Pearse, and journalist Veronica Guerin.