Glenstal Abbey through the seasons with photographs by Valerie O’Sullivan, edited by Colman Ó Clabaigh OSB (Columba Books, €24.99) Through pictures and text this beautiful book captures the life of one of Ireland’s most famous abbeys. At the heart of it all is an annual round of worship, prayer and reflection. But this is also…
Mainly about books by the books editor St Mary’s Abbey in Dublin was founded, according to the Annals of the Four Masters, in 846. Over the coming centuries it in grew in size into an important ecclesiastical institution, eventually holding the country’s largest library. The nature of such places began to change with the arrival…
Defending Trinity College Dublin, Easter 1916: Anzacs and the Rising by Rory Sweetman (Four Courts Press, €19.99) Dr Rory Sweetman is a Kildare-born New Zealander who studied at Trinity College Dublin and Cambridge University, and has has written extensively on aspects of the Irish abroad. He is the author of Bishop in the Dock: the…
A Perfect Peace: Newman Saint for Our Time by Bishop Fintan Monahan (Veritas, €7.99) Newman: A short Biography by Michael Collins(Messenger Publications, €9.95) The canonisation of John Henry Newman last Sunday had brought his life and spirituality before a great many people who were perhaps only vaguely aware of their true complexity. Many of these…
The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: A Biography by Carlos Eire (Princeton University Press, £21.00) The Autobiography of Teresa of Avila is a rightly famous book, and remains widely read. But the title is slightly misleading, for the text was composed not at the free volition of the saint herself, but at the insistence…
Many saints have written on spirituality or theology. But few have been what John Henry Newman was, a writer by vocation, the author of lasting works in a wide variety of genres. The seeds of his sainthood, indeed the full flowering of his sainthood, are to be found in his writings, the whole range of…
Sister Wendy’s 100 Best-loved Paintings compiled by Sr Wendy Beckett (SPCK, £25.00) This is both the latest and the last book of the celebrated TV art critic, Sr Wendy Beckett, who died last Christmastide at the age of 88, on the feast of St Stephen. She was not, as many seemed to think, a nun…
A Personal Perspective on Irish PEN by J Anthony Gaughan (Kingdom Books, €15.00) PEN was an international association of writers founded in London in 1921 – the initials stood for ‘Poets, Essayists and Novelists’, but in fact many kinds of writers are now members. The club, as its members thought of it, was intended to…
Dining with the Durrells: Stories and Recipes from the Cookery Archives of Mrs Louise Durrell, by David Shimwell, foreword by Lee Durrell, afterword by Jacquie Durrell (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99) My Family and other Animals was the late Gerald Durrell’s greatest success, an engaging mixture of an amusing family saga with an account of the…
Mainly About Books By the books editor Among the many institutions that derive from the 1920s that still survive to this day the Folklore Department of University College Dublin is the most interesting, and perhaps the most culturally significant. Its productions, such as a recent work on the folklore of our coast-wise fishing communities, often…