This is the year of the regular biannual art exhibition in Venice bears the title ‘Foreigners Everywhere’. Opened on April 20 it runs until November 24. This year sees a return to the original post-war format of national pavilions. The result has been an increase of interest from many new countries outside Europe, especially in…

The Hidden Ireland by Daniel Corkery (Wipf and Stock, Eugene, Oregon, $35.00 / €33.50 / £26.00; other editions widely available on line) This a reissue of a book by an established writer and patriot which was written a century ago, back in 1924, and issued in Dublin by an Irish publisher. It is a cultural landmark…

Speculative Minds in Georgian Ireland: Novelty, Experiment and Widening Horizons Toby Barnard and Alison FitzGerald (Four Courts Press, €50.00 / £45.95) Looking back on the Ireland of the 18th Century it appears at first glance to be settled picture, but on closer examination is turns out to be something of a jigsaw puzzle, with a multitude…

  The big summer exhibition at the Ulster Museum in Belfast this year will be the exhibition of two important Caravaggio’s together for the first time in centuries. One is from the National Gallery in London, The Supper at Emmaus (1601); the other is lent by the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, the now…

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…

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.…