The Victorians: The Titans Who Forged Modern Britain by Jacob Rees-Mogg (W.H. Allen, €20.00) At the time of writing the futures of Brexit and the British Conservative party are still unsettled. But whatever happens we can expect the author of this book to have some role in it. Jacob Rees-Mogg is being spoken of by some…
An Urban Sketcher’s Galway by Róisín Curé (Currach Books, €22.99) My wife and I often go down to Galway by train to have lunch, then a walk in Salthill by the sea, rounded off with a browse in Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop – truly the best in Ireland. The city, in our experience has changed dramatically since…
Mainly About Books by the books editor The other week in the course of a visit to Sligo, we spent part of a morning in Drumcliffe churchyard. We had been there before – what poetry lover in Ireland does not want to see the beautifully located grave of W.B. Yeats? The church – which…
Mainly about books by the books editor Under the City Hall of Dublin at the top of Dame Street – right in the heart of Dublin – one of the rooms of the basement crypt has been converted into a charming little café, the rest of the vaults to a museum devoted to unrolling…
The Cultural Reception of the Bible: Explorations in Theology, Literature and the Arts by Salvador Ryan & Liam M. Tracey OSM (Open Air / Four Courts Press, €50.00) With essays by over 30 contributors from Prof. Thomas O’Loughlin to the poet John F. Deane, this compendium covers a very wide range of topics and eras. “The…
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,…