The Benedictine Nuns & Kylemore Abbey: A History by Deirdre Raftery and Catherine KilBride (The Benedictine Nuns Kylemore Abbey Centenary/Irish Academic Press, €19.95/£17.99) This book is the story of an Irish success, but it is much more than that. It also encapsulates, in the story of Kylemore Abbey, a history of Connemara over some two centuries,…
Irish Jesuits in Penal Times: Thomas Betagh and his Companions by Thomas J. Morrissey SJ (Messenger Publications, €19.95) In what is now called St Kevin’s Park in Dublin’s Camden Row, just off Camden Street, which was once a graveyard dating from medieval times, there stands a monument. It is to the Jesuit Fr John Austin, who…
The World of Books By the books editor In recent months people have been forced for reasons of social solidarity to work from home, rather than make what was for many a two-hour drive to work and another two hours home. But this working from home, feared at first, has worked out well. Working from…
Jesus Through Muslim Eyes by Richard Shumack (SPCK, £12.99) The other day, before I started on Jesus Through Muslim Eyes, I read in a 1957 book of travels through North Africa from Tunis to Cairo that in Beja, a remote village near the Libyan-Tunisian border, the mosque was dedicated to Jesus Christ. It surprised the author…
Really Rotten Rhymes poems by Gabriel Fitzmaurice, illustrations by Alice Coleman (Mercier Press, €14.99/£13.99) This is a book filled with the rude vitality of childhood, with equal measures of both qualities. It makes a wonderful read for those who have children still around them, or can remember anything at all of their own early years. This…
Mainly About Books By the books editor The current protests in the US and the Black Lives Matter campaign that has spread to other countries take my mind back a good way to what was, in effect, my first true contact with American culture. This was on a flight to New York (where a further…
Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph (Simon & Schuster, $30.00/£18.99) Frank Litton In 2015, Pope Francis addressed a joint meeting of the United States’ Congress. He invoked the memory of famous Americans: “The complexities of history not withstanding, these men and women for all their many differences and…
Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come by T. J. Clark (Thames & Hudson, £18.95) British-born writer T. J. Clark is a Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. His main field of interest has been 19th-Century French art, and such artists as Manet and Courbet, so this…
On Marriage, On Birth, On Death (three titles in the series “How to Find God”) by Timothy and Kathy Keller (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99) In this time of peril and stress, when Covid-19 continues to spread across the benighted nations of Africa, many are faced very directly with question of what it is they believe and…
With the assistance of galleries around the world, the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome has mounted a magnificent, once-in-a-lifetime show, celebrating the youthful yet astonishingly mature genius of Raphael, who died in 1522 at the ridiculously early age of 37. Masterpieces which would have taken years of travelling to see, have been brought together. The…