For centuries Jerusalem and the Holy Land was a place of great mystique, the hope of pious pilgrims as the object of a once in a lifetime visit. But over the course of the long nineteenth century this began to change: new techniques of image making and reproduction began to alter the ideas that people…
The Christmas season has always been the time when families buy more books than they do at other times of the year. Here, arranged in something like order of age, are some suggestions from this year’s new offerings. The Dead Zoo by Peter Donnelly (Gill Books, €14.99) This artist’s most amusing books about the president up…
The World of Books by the Books Editor Literacy for both young and adult is an essential of social life. So these days teachers, politicians and booksellers are all agreed on the need to encourage reading. Easy enough with girls, it seems, but boys need more encouragement. So at Christmas all the deluge of new…
This has been a strange and difficult year for publishers, large and small. As religious and spiritual books come largely from small firms, they have been hit very hard. With lockdown across their main markets closing bookshops, online purchases, click-and-collect, and special localised deliveries have been the trend. So sales do go on, but many firms…
Christmas Tradition, Truth and the Total Baubles by Nick Page (John Murray Press, £6.99) The contents of this book may seem very familiar to some readers, for every Christmas articles and books appear about the traditions of the Nativity and the events surrounding it. Nick Page, who is an agreeable yet well-informed writer with an amusing…
The Journey of the Mayflower: God’s Outlaws, or the Invention of Freedom by Stephen Tomkins (Hodder & Stoughton, £21.99) Today is Thanksgiving Day across the United States, a feast day that rivals Christmas in the minds and memories of its citizens. We have to particularise the United State of America, as Thanksgiving, which derives from the…
O Shining Light: Old English Meditations for Advent and Christmas, introduction and commentary by Jacob and Mamie Riyeff (Gracewing, £9.99) In the Venerable Bede there is a passage where a pagan Saxon king likens the life of an individual to the flight of a small birds through the warm and lighted hall of a Anglo-Saxon home,…
Mainly about books By the books editor The great and internationally-regarded art galleries of Ireland (though now for a period of months necessarily closed) are institutions we are all rightly proud of. I sometime think, though, that they do not always do full justice to some talents who worked in what some might think of…
Quiet Times With God: a Devotional by Joyce Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99) This is the sort of book that has a very long history in Christianity. Common in the Middle Ages and earlier, they changed their form at the Reformation. Some, like the book of hours of the Duc du Berry, were wonders of the…
Old Ireland in Colour by John Breslin and Sarah-Anne Buckley (Merrion Press, €24.95/£22.90) The idea of this book will delight many people, and it should prove to be a huge Christmas time bestseller. The creators have taken a wide range of historical photographs, some very familiar already in monochrome, others little seen. These have been colourised,…