The Contemporary Woman: Can she really have it all, by Michele Guinness (Hodder, £10.99/ €12.99) Author Michele Guinness is one of the Guinness clan, the Anglo-Irish brewing family of longstanding fame, but only by marriage. Back in 1999 she wrote a widely selling family history called The Guinness Spirit, which many found both entertaining and…
The Douai Martyrs, by Gerard Skinner (Gracewing Publishing, £14.99/ €17.99) Gerard Skinner, who once studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and later at the Venerable English College in Rome. He is the author of many books, including the valuable Newman the Priest. Here, however, he turns to a theme which should perhaps…
Shaping the Assembly: How our buildings form us in worship, ed. by Thomas O’Loughlin (Messenger Publications, €25.00/£23.23) Thomas O’Loughlin is a distinguished scholar who has taught at several institutions in England, retiring as a professor emeritus at the University of Nottingham. This book brings into focus several of his long standing concerns. It is a…
Spectral Mansions: The Making of a Dublin Tenement, 1800-1914, by Timothy Murtagh (Four Courts Press for Dublin City Council with aid from the Heritage Council, €30.00/ £26.00) To those familiar only with the ever-rebuilding Dublin of today, there is in this book a strangely prophetic cartoon from a Dublin comic paper of July 1914, captioned…
The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State, by Anna M. Grzymała-Busse (Princeton University Press, €98.00/ £84.00; also in paperback) They read the roots of the European state in a positive way, and as an endorsement, so to speak, of Augustinian City of God. But that is not quite what the author had in…
The significance of the date, for those not perhaps as steeped in national lore as others, is that it marks the birth of Arthur Griffith in 1871. He died, as many more will remember, on August 12, 1922, of sudden heart failure; to be closely followed 10 days later by the death in action of…
Index, A History of the – A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age, by Denis Duncan (Allen Lane/ Penguin Books, €15.50/ £10.99) Dennis Duncan, who lectures in English at the University College London, is a man of many parts and a writer of diverse, bookish interests. His most entertaining book, which deals as…
This Listowel interior (pictured), a water colour rather than an oil, painted in 1842, is a picture with a story. It is attributed to a Miss Bridget Maria Fitzgerald (1817-1905), a lady with some local reputation as a painter. It was come upon by the distinguished art historian Dr Anne Cruickshank, who photographed it in…
Mary, Founder of Christianity by Chris Maunder (One World, €21.99/£18.99) Over the recent decades the role of women in the first centuries of the Church has come under more critical examination. One result of this, arising also from developed views of the role of women in society today, has been the demand for the ordination…
A New Ireland: Memories and Reflections of Cardinal Cahal B. Daly edited by Gemma Loughran, foreword by Archbishop Paul Gallagher (Veritas, €12.99 / £11.50) This little book was edited by Northern Ireland barrister Gemma Loughlan, who knew Cahal Daly from her days as a student. To mark the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement she…