William Ua Cellaig writes narrative history from a farmhouse outside Ennistymon, County Clare, where a shelf of well-worn Alpine maps testifies to a lifelong fascination with Switzerland's improbable path to nationhood. Trained in history before turning to independent research and writing, he has spent the past decade tracing the revolutionary movements that reshaped small European states in the shadow of larger powers, with particular attention to the institutions that outlast the upheavals that created them. His work favours the overlooked hinge-moments of European history - the years when a nation's future was genuinely undecided - and he brings to them the same patient attention to primary detail that Irish local historians have long applied closer to home. He lives in Clare with his family and an ever-expanding collection of nineteenth-century atlases.