From the early Gaels to Hugh Leonard, Irish people have been seducing, cajoling, stalking, obsessing, throwing jealous fits, begging marriage, urging adultery, mourning lost loves, plotting new loves, threatening to kill themselves, and addressing moving last words to loved ones before going to their deaths all through the medium of the written word.

Straight from the Heart is both a beautiful gift book and a piece of fascinating social history. It comprises more than 60 love letters ranging in time from 1694 to 1998. Bridget Hourican's brilliant selection includes Yeats to Maud Gonne, correspondence between the tragic Francis Sheehy Skeffington and his wife Hannah as well as that between James Joyce and Nora Barnacle. Three of the 1916 leaders, Thomas McDonagh, Joseph M Plunkett and Eamonn Ceannt are here as well as Michael Collins, John Millington Synge and George Bernard Shaw. It even includes a love letter from Eamonn DeValera to his wife Sinead. Most touchingly we have a letter from Patrick Kavanagh to Hilda Moriarty, the beauty for whom he wrote Raglan Road.

The book also includes some ordinary people - letters from the Front and from emigrants writing home to their sweethearts - and these are often as eloquent and heartbreaking as those written by the literati or historical giants as love can raise any man (or woman) to passion.