"It’s almost surreal to see The Colour of Time piled up on display in the windows and on the tables of bookshops all over Ireland at the moment - because for two years this epic collection of digitally colorised historical photographs existed only in draft image selections pinned to the walls of my office near London and in digital form on the screen of Marina Amaral’s computer in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. But here it is: the product of a two year collaboration between the two of us, which aims to tell a brand new history of the world between 1850 and 1960, from the Crimean War to the Cold War and the steam age to the space age. The book showcases Marina's astonishing, magical artistry, which breathes vivid colour across old black-and-white images with the beguiling effect of bringing history startlingly alive. My words attempt to weave the stories of those images together.  

We looked at around 10,000 images to whittle down to the final selection of 200 pictures that you’ll see in The Colour of Time. There were plenty of amazing photographs left on the cutting room floor - an agonising feeling. But some photos simply had to be in there. One of my favourites is the image of Michael Collins taken shortly before his death at Béal na Bláth in 1922. The original monochrome image is itself incredibly striking - full of movement and life, but heavy, as hindsight tells us, with the prescience of death. In colour, all of that is magnified and intensified: it’s as though Collins is back before us, striding purposefully off the pages of history and returning to a world he left so abruptly nearly a century ago, at the age of 31."  

Dan Jones