The Battle of the Four Courts by Michael Fewer (Head of Zeus, £20/€28) Easter Week in the GPO has been the subject of many books, providing a day by day, almost an hour by hour, account of what happened, if not why. The siege of the Four Courts in 1922 has not been so lucky. Yet…

Hunt Museum, The Custom House, Rutland St, Limerick Exhibition continues to September 30, 2019 The catalogue (€25) is available from the museum. The summer exhibition at Limerick’s Hunt Museum is just the thing for a family outing, a show which will introduce children and perhaps others to the delights of art. On display are paintings…

Mainly About Books by the books editor   I have been wondering over recent days what Achille Ratti, later in life Pope Pius XI, would have thought of the recent images of toe-to-heel climbers, some 300 of them, ascending Mount Everest to take a selfie at the summit. In the course of this insane “bucket-list…

A Different Dublin: The 1960s through the lens, photographs by Bill Hogan (Currach Books, €19.99) Bill Hogan was a cinema projectionist in different cinemas across Dublin in the 1960s. He worked largely at night, so most of the daylight hours were his own to indulge his developing interest in street photography. He was largely inspired…

Medjugorje, which has grown into one of the most popular pilgrimages for Catholics around the world in recent decades, lies in the southern Herzegovina region of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which Catholics make up a mere 14% of the population. For many centuries, this area of Eastern Europe was under Ottoman rule,…

Recently our local amateur drama group was courageous enough to mount a production of Dion Boucicault’s Victorian melodrama The Colleen Bawn. I don’t use the word Victorian casually, for this was one of the Queen’s favourite plays; she had drawings she had done of the scenes in her personal art collection. She loved the theatre,…

The Naked Hermit: A journey to the heart of Celtic Britain by Nick Mayhew-Smith (SPCK, £19.99) Readers may recall a six-part television series Britain’s Holiest Places from about seven years ago. This was presented by Nick Mayhew-Smith who had written the book that inspired the programmes of the series. Here, however, he deals with a…

Contemplating the Camino – An Ignatian Guide by Brendan McManus SJ  (Messenger Publications, €4.95 / £4.50) This little pamphlet is intended not as a guide to the actual trails from France across the north of Spain, so much as an aid to the inner, mystical path of which it is an exemplar. The author takes…

Angels: A Visible and Invisible History by Peter Stanford (Hodder & Stoughton, £20.00) “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”: when Hamlet encounters the ghost of his father on the parapet of Elsinore he appeals to the angels to preserve him, which is quite in keeping with the Catholic cast of Shakespeare’s imagination, poised as he…