Roderic O’Connor and the Moderns: Between Paris and Pont-Aven exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland curated by Jonathan Benington with Brendan Rooney, 18 July-28 October. Catalogue price €19.95. Today the small town of Pont-Aven in Brittany is a busy tourist centre, a place living off its artistic past. Here in the last decade of…
The Preacher and the Prelate: The Achill Mission Colony and the Battle for Souls in Famine Ireland by Patricia Byrne (Merrion Press, €14.99) It is strange how the same place can have different effects on different people and at different times. We recently reviewed a book on Achill Island as it appears today to a poet…
The World of Books by the Books Editor The Piri Re’is is an early 16th Century Ottoman map, which has attracted a great deal of interest, of all kinds, since it was rediscovered in Istanbul’s Topkapi Museum in 1929. Named for the admiral who had it made, it shows the coasts of the Atlantic and…
The World of Books by the Books Editor Back in 2013, the Bishop of Northampton Dr Peter Doyle appointed Canon John Udris to inquire into the suitability of Gilbert Keith Chesterton for canonisation. Canon Udris’s report will be given to the bishop later this month. He has been quoted in the press as saying…
Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith by Emma Mason (Oxford University Press, €30.00; available also as an ebook) John F. Deane The ever popular Christmas carol In the Bleak Mid-Winter was written by Christina Rossetti but holds its fame more from the musical setting by Gustav Holst than by the strength of the poem. Rossetti wrote a great…
Am I a Feminist? Are You? by Mary Kenny (New Island Books, €13.95) Those who can recall earlier manifestations of Mary Kenny might be daunted by a title so redolent of the #metoo generation and the fierce quarrels of the present day gender wars. But the present-day Mary is a person of great experience as well…
World of Books Some days I stand in front of the magazine racks in Easons and wonder if the great era of the general magazine is now over. Are they, so to speak, now dead in the water, killed off by television and the internet? Certainly they are not what they once were. The…
Saints for the Family by John Murray (Messenger Publications, €9.95) Inspiration from the Saints: Stories from the Lives of Catholic Holy Men and Women by Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh (Angelico Press, £12.50 / US$16.95) Fr John Murray is the busy parish priest of Downpatrick in Ulster. His name may well be familiar to readers both from his…
A Gospel of Hope by Walter Brueggemann (Hodder and Stoughton, £12.99) As we get ready to mark the end of the First World War, the Great War as it was then called, and the war to supposedly save civilisation, many will be recalling that the treaty that concluded that appalling conflict was the source, within a…
Homily Hints and Prayers: Daily Mass Reading by Silvester O’Flynn (Columba Books, €19.99) In the blurb of this quite large book there is a striking little phrase: “Where there is no priest available, this book would be an invaluable help to any group who gathers to pray with the day’s Mass Reading.” Now this may seem…