He was born in Ireland in 1947. He went on to study drawing, painting and sculpture in Munich and Vienna before reading history at Oxford University. His career has straddled the worlds of art and writing, and he has published a number of books on Irish history using his family’s history as his starting point to explore notions of exile and identity. His most successful book has been Ireland’s Other History (published in 2012 by the Lilliput Press, Dublin), an account of Irish prehistory and its European origins illustrated with his own drawings. Most recently, he has been working on a complex, early-medieval European story about the Jewish kings of Narbonne, which is also to be published by Lilliput. In November 2015, the Delahunty Gallery in London showed his paintings of interiors, one of his constant themes, including many of Chatsworth, where the late Duke of Devonshire was a collector of his work.