The Doré Illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy Search Press, £19.00 / €20.50 Gustave Doré (1832-1883), a cradle Catholic born in the conflicted city of Strasbourg, was an artist whose anxious imagination was suffused with an engagement with the supernatural on many levels. Some years ago, I think in 2006, my wife and I on a visit…
Finding Mangan: The Lives and Afterlives of Ireland’s National Poet Bridget Hourican Gill Books, €22.99 / £17.50 James Clarence Mangan was not always destined to be Ireland’s ‘national poet’. That place at that time in the 1830s had been long and largely filled by Thomas Moore. Today Moore has a large and challenging statue…
Maynooth College Reflects on the Catechesis in the Life of the Church, edited by Jeremy Corley, Andrew Meszaros & John-Paul Sheridan, foreword by Bishop Michael Duignan (Messenger Publications, €14.95 / £12.95) This book consists of some 18 papers by writers directly associated for the most part with Maynooth College, and as such it represents…
Casimir Markievicz: A Polish Artist on Bohemian Dublin (1903-1913) An exhibition in the State Apartments of Dublin Castle, runs to September 14 2025; Co-produced by the Embassy of the Republic of Poland and the Office of Public Works. Entrance fee, €3.00; catalogue, €5.00. Count Markievicz, the Polish husband of the redoubtable Constance Gore-Booth, was an artist…
Year in the Woods: Montalto through the Seasons, by Paul Clements (Merrion Books, €18.99/ £17.99) Our relations with the natural world have provided a theme which has engaged people of spirit and sensibility since writing began almost, but certainly in the last few centuries. In receiving this book for review the title at once…
Here in Ireland the recovery in 1993 of a Caravaggio painting from the wall of the dining room of the Jesuit residence in Leeson Street, Dublin, made us all very conscious of this extraordinary artist of the Baroque period. That painting, The Taking of Christ, from 1602, now has a home in the National Gallery, where…
The days the news seems to have, on an almost daily basis, some medical story in prominence: the saga of the Children’s Hospital, crowded Emergency Departments, patients on trolleys for days on end, a lack of beds nationwide, unnecessary operations on children, failures to treat others… It seems to go and on. What perhaps we…
This is a book which I suspect anyone who takes an interest in Irish literary history will have heard of, if not already read. It has a small place in Joycean mythology as a passage in it (see ch. XVII) describes a visit made quite by chance in September 1902 by the author and a…
Religion, Landscape & Settlement in Ireland, Kevin Whelan (Four Courts Press, €24.95 / £39.99) The cover of Kevin Whelan’s new book, which shows early Christian beehive cells on the Skelligs, might give the hesitating purchaser the impression that he deals in detail with developments from the introduction of Christianity to Ireland. But in fact the text…
Christ Alive: Reflections from the Shadows of Life into the Light of God, John Deane-O’Keefe (Resource Publications, Eugene, Oregon USA, £19.50; available through Amazon) This is an unusual book. The note on the author tells us that John Deane -O’’Keefe is a church pastor, prison and hospital chaplain, and forensic criminologist. This suggests a rare…