In a Harbour Green: Celebrating Benedict Kiely by George O’Brien (Irish Academic Press, €19.95) In the hurry and bustle of modern Irish literature, Ben Kiely belongs seemingly to another world. This may well be because he was one of that generation of writers whose normal route to writing was though journalism and broadcasting. The broad rich…

Mainly About Books by the Books Editor The slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ has rightly swept the world, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that it protests about the condition of racial harmony – or lack of it – in the United States today. Like so many movements of the moment, it reflects an…

As an occasional continuation of our series ‘Lockdown Reading’. This week we are publishing an appreciation of an important book once very well known, but now neglected… Realizations: Newman’s own selections of his sermons edited by Vincent Ferrer Blehl, with a preface by Muriel Spark (Liturgical Press, 2009 [originally published 1964]) Teresa
 Whitington These 13 sermons…

Sacred Space: The Prayerbook 2021  (Messenger Publications, €12.95/£15.49) The cover of the new edition of this always popular book shows a lighthouse at dusk, and out at sea a barely visible sailing ship in the distance. There came into my mind at once those lines from Newman, “lead, kindly light, amidst th’encircling gloom…”, which is…

Summer outings (No.6 in a six-part series) This book, edited from Tim White’s Irish diaries, was published in 1959, the year after the compilation of his separately published Arthurian novels appeared in one volume, The Once and Future King. This book became a major best seller here and in the Americas. It provided the source…

Summer outings (No.5 in a six-part series) Today Richard Hayward’s long series of books, over seven of them, all dealing with his journeys into the four provinces and into the mind and imaginations of his countrymen, north and south, are out of print and long forgotten. An Ulster man of many parts, he died in…

Summer outings (No.4 in a six-part series) My first visit to Iona was a memorable event in my life. After a long dreary drive across the central valley of Mull, we came down to the little port from where visitors took the ferry to the island. It was now a sunny afternoon. The sea bed…

Adomnán’s Lex Innocentium and the Laws of War by James W. Houlihan (Four Courts Press, €50.00 /£45.00) In this book the ordinary reader will find an account of the roots of the views about the treatments of innocent civilians, clergy and other unarmed folk in time of war. It is a discussion of the Cáin Adomnáin…

Summer outings (No.3 in a six-part series) Clonmacnoise is one of the most remarkable places in Ireland. However, back in the late 1940s, the Emergency had left it even more isolated, a place which in the right light could seem unchanged since Early Christian times in Ireland. One of the pioneers of exploring Ireland’s inland…

Summer outings (No.2 in a six-part series) Daniel
 O’Connor The Canon Daniel O’Connor (1843-1919) was the parish priest in the 1890s in whose domain Lough Derg and the ancient Shrine of St Patrick’s Purgatory lay. He was one of its first real historians of the place, a writer who devoted many years to collecting and…