We all know that there is nothing inevitable about history. Things did not have to work out the way they actually did. Ferriter looks at 40 events in 20th Century Irish life and wonders how they might have been different: What if Joyce and Beckett had stayed in Ireland? What if Britain had blocked Irish immigration in the 1950s? What if there had been no Late Late Show?

This book not only offers a glimpse of what might have been, it is also an entertaining, thoughtful, provocative and original look at some of the milestones of twentieth century Irish history.