My passion for history was ignited by political biography when I was a teenager. You read the life story of a person who – if the writer is any good – captures your attention like the protagonist of a novel; and along the way, almost by chance, you learn about the great events in which the person was a player. My strongest memory of Disraeli, from a 1951 book by Hesketh Pearson, is his maiden speech in the House of Commons in 1837, when, after being heckled and jeered at for his flamboyant dress and delivery, he said: ‘Though I sit down now, the time will come when you will hear me.’

These days I not only read biography but write it. So I seized on The Taoiseach, a collection of essays edited by Iain Dale, as a painless way to rectify my shameful ignorance of recent Irish political history and its leading figures. It consists of short biographies of each of the 16 men (they are all men so far) who have occupied the top position in Irish politics since the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922.

It did the job. I now know that Sean Lemass, when he was a 16-year-old Irish volunteer in 1916, played with his loaded revolver in the family sitting room and accidentally shot dead his 19-month-old baby brother Herbert. I also, thanks to a luminously written short essay by Professor Bryce Evans of Liverpool Hope University, understand why Lemass is often considered the greatest of the taoisigh (the plural of taoiseach). From 1959 to 1966, he made three great shifts away from the siege mentality of the early years of independence. These shifts in the long term transformed the country and its economy. Making them required him to initiate policies which he had spent a lifetime opposing.

He saw that protectionism would not work in the postwar world and emphasised the importance of attracting outside investment. He recognised the reality that was Northern Ireland. And he pointed his country towards Europe, where – whatever the UK may think of the European Union – Ireland remains happy and prosperous.

With a different writer tackling each taoiseach, the quality is naturally variable. Several chapters, like Evans’s Lemass, are very good indeed. The great Eamon de Valera is brought to magnificent life in all his glory and his contradictions in an informative, thoughtful and readable piece by the Irish journalist and De Valera biographer David McCullagh. And Professor Gary Murphy of Dublin City University lucidly and fluently garners sympathy and even admiration for Charles Haughey, who served three terms as taoiseach in the 1980s but, as Murphy writes, is associated with ‘corruption, venality and profligacy’. In reality, says Murphy, he was ‘a master compartmentaliser who, like Icarus, soared too close to the sun’.

The great Eamon de Valera is brought to magnificent life in all his glory and contradictions

Other chapters are less distinguished, though all are workmanlike. John A. Costello, the taoiseach who followed De Valera in 1948, was really a lawyer who dabbled in politics, which made him a less effective political leader (a problem that may afflict Britain’s current prime minister). It cannot be easy to make him interesting, and Charles Lysaght, an Irish lawyer and obituarist, does not succeed in doing so. For Albert Reynolds (1992-4), instead of commissioning a new piece, the publishers have decided to edit down one intended for an entirely different purpose: the entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, written by the Fianna Fail politician Martin Mansergh. It tells the story in a pedestrian manner.

This book was a really good idea, largely well executed. Most Britons, even those who know some history, are dreadfully ignorant about the politics of the country which is our nearest neighbour, whose destiny we guided for eight centuries until 1922.  Here is a way to grasp the essentials quickly and enjoyably. Having each taoiseach dealt with by a different writer allows the reader to see different takes on the same issue, and to watch the issues weave their way through Irish politics: relationship with the UK, with the EEC and now the EU, and the long stranglehold of the Catholic church over domestic policy.

It is possible to trace through these essays the extraordinary progress Ireland has made, from a poverty-stricken back-water with hardly any infrastructure, so deeply in the grip of the Catholic Church that it was almost a theocracy, to a modern, thriving liberal democracy, where the power of the Church has been broken to an extent that no one would have predicted when I first visited the country in the 1970s.