Faith Finding a Voice by Cardinal Vincent Nichols (Bloomsbury, £12.99) The new book by the Cardinal Archbishop of London will undoubtedly find a wide audience. How encouraging it is, too, that a senior prelate sees it as part of his mission to devote time to composing such a book. It does not happen everywhere. His hope…
Maria Edgeworth’s Letters from Ireland selected and edited by Valerie Pakenham (Lilliput Press, €40.00hb, €25.00pb) The landed gentry and the great houses of Ireland have not had a great reputation in general. But many of those for whom the traditional nationalist narrative has long sufficed, might well have their minds, if not changed, at least refined…
World of Books We may be about to see major changes in the way the major books shops in Ireland – mostly now the property of British companies – are run. Quite how all of this will work out for readers anxious to stay in touch, not just with Britain, as these companies imagine, but…
The National Gallery now has on display the newly restored Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph (c. 1620) by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, better known as Guercino. This is a baroque masterpiece with an interesting history, for it was the very first painting purchased by Sir Denis Mahon, the connoisseur and scholar in 1934 for £120.…
The World of Books by the books editor A bout in bed with one of those picked-up bugs that linger on, has allowed me to read some books that I ought to have read, or reread, ages ago. I can leave the rereads for now, for one the reads was extraordinarily interesting and revealing. This…
Fáilte Pope Francis … from the Children of Ireland (Columba Press, €14.99) This delightful book had its origins in a competition run by The Irish Catholic with primary schools all over Ireland encouraging young children to write a letter of welcome to the Pope on his visit in August this year to Dublin for the…
In the years immediately after the ending of the Great War, or the “War to save civilisation” as WWI was once called, Europe and then the wider world became aware of the existence in a remote village in Southern Italy of a priest for whom the most extraordinary claims, not just of piety, but of…
TheWorld of Books by the books editor There is a striking phrase quoted in Dr Ian d’Alton’s review across the page. The author of the book in question takes on those who criticize Redmond for not holding to what Ronan Fanning characterized as ‘the nationalist delusion that the partition of Ireland was avoidable’. Meleady…
Over recent decades readers of academic books on history and archaeology, and even some ordinary mass market trade books, will have noticed the increasing use of the term ‘Common Era’ (CE) rather than the older BC and AD for describing dates, the system familiar for centuries. This new usage arose from the reluctance of some…
Wonder Beyond Belief: On Christianity by Navid Kermani (Polity, £25.00) There is an old saying that “I never knew what my house looked like, as I had never been outside it”. This applies as well to religion: Christians cannot know what Christianity looks like because they never “go outside of it”. This book, by a distinguished…