With Dante you do not just enter a poet’s world, but a poet’s cosmos. Hell is defined by theologians as a place or state of punishment. Dante, Doré, and others present visions of the place, but the state of hell may be something very different to what they have so generously imagined. Flann O’Brien more…
Last week the annual Pan Celtic Festival was held in Carlow last week. With groups of musicians, singers and dancers it is a notably vital occasion, at which Celtic culture from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and Spain are on display. Celtic culture in its several varieties spreads from the Outer Isles of Scotland along…
These two very different books explore aspects of the same centuries long tradition in European architecture, which by extension into the colonies abroad, means worldwide. It is a tradition which has left its mark in many places in the form of classical style churches, which with many public buildings and private mansions, form an important…
Easter being the most important feast day in the Christian calendar has always attracted artists. Each incident of Holy Week from the Last Supper, the arrest in the garden, the trial before Pontius Pilate, the denials by Peter, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the women at the empty tomb: each of these has been the…
One of the curious facts of 2,000 years of Christian history is the readiness with which Christians will dispute their traditions and the dates appropriate to them, especially in relation to the nature, date and place of Easter, the most important date in the whole Christian calendar that is celebrated this weekend. Historically, the…
This I suspect is the sort of book that many families have been looking for, a compact, highly readable and adroitly written narrative of the Irish aboard. Author Bunbury makes vivid use of all the human parts of a 2,000-year-old history that academic historians resolutely leave out in favour of a more austere impersonal narrative.…
This Sunday the whole world, it seems, will for a few hours become Irish, or at least recover enough of their nominal ‘Irishness’ to join in the fun. President Biden, in the name of the American people, will accept yet again a giant bowl of flourishing shamrock, and avow his Irish roots. Streets around the…
St Patrick’s day sees the arrival of great numbers of visitors from abroad, many of them part of, or deeply interested in the Irish diaspora. This seems an appropriate moment then to visit the EPIC presentation down on Customs House in the Dublin Financial Centre. EPIC stands for Irish Emigration Museum, by the way. This is…
The latest partnered exhibition at the National Gallery, featuring as it does the works of a series of great artists, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer and a few others, is a remarkable show, not so much for its bravura accomplishments of style and setting, but for its concentration on the wonderful landscapes of the human face through…
This is an original book. Whereas most books for young readers try to involve them in word and meaning, this is a book without words. But it still manages to speak volumes. Significantly it is dedicated by creator Tatyana Feeney to her own father, so the pages must carry for her a hidden level of…