To Love and to be Loved by Desmond O’Donnell (Dominican Publications, €15.00) The many people coming to Dublin next week will all have in mind two themes which the Pope Francis has identified as important not just for all Catholics, but for every human being, indeed for all life on earth. These are the themes of the…
The World of Books by the Books Editor These days papal visits, such as Pope Francis will make to Ireland next week, are taken for granted. They have become commonplace, but in the perspective of the two thousand years of history they are a very recent development. Indeed, there is a great need for…
The World of Books by the books editor A writer’s words often come back upon him in surprising ways. It is one of the problems of writing anything at all. I learnt this the other day in relation to my own words. The British Newspaper Archive website has recently added a further tranche of Irish…
“Mise an Mac San”: ag cuimhneamh ar an Athair Peadar Ó Laoghaire / “I am that Son”: Remembering an tAthair Peadar Ó Laoghaire by Eilis and Pat O’Brien (Eilis O’Brien, Ballard, Castlelyons, Co. Cork, Tel: O87-1235203; €15.00 + €8 p&p) Of the few Irish priests who have achieved important literary fame, Fr Peadar O’Leary alone…
Roderic O’Connor and the Moderns: Between Paris and Pont-Aven exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland curated by Jonathan Benington with Brendan Rooney, 18 July-28 October. Catalogue price €19.95. Today the small town of Pont-Aven in Brittany is a busy tourist centre, a place living off its artistic past. Here in the last decade of…
The Preacher and the Prelate: The Achill Mission Colony and the Battle for Souls in Famine Ireland by Patricia Byrne (Merrion Press, €14.99) It is strange how the same place can have different effects on different people and at different times. We recently reviewed a book on Achill Island as it appears today to a poet…
The World of Books by the Books Editor The Piri Re’is is an early 16th Century Ottoman map, which has attracted a great deal of interest, of all kinds, since it was rediscovered in Istanbul’s Topkapi Museum in 1929. Named for the admiral who had it made, it shows the coasts of the Atlantic and…
The World of Books by the Books Editor Back in 2013, the Bishop of Northampton Dr Peter Doyle appointed Canon John Udris to inquire into the suitability of Gilbert Keith Chesterton for canonisation. Canon Udris’s report will be given to the bishop later this month. He has been quoted in the press as saying…
Am I a Feminist? Are You? by Mary Kenny (New Island Books, €13.95) Those who can recall earlier manifestations of Mary Kenny might be daunted by a title so redolent of the #metoo generation and the fierce quarrels of the present day gender wars. But the present-day Mary is a person of great experience as well…
World of Books Some days I stand in front of the magazine racks in Easons and wonder if the great era of the general magazine is now over. Are they, so to speak, now dead in the water, killed off by television and the internet? Certainly they are not what they once were. The…