Secret of the powers that be In 1977 Seán MacBride was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. An invitation was extended to the members of the cabinet, including the Minster of Foreign Affairs, to attend the award ceremony on 20 September. This posed the government with a problem. MacBride had been awarded the Nobel Prize in…
Secrets of the powers that be “Some people seem to like giving interviews.” These were the words typed on a card from the Pontifical Council for the Family in Rome. It was sent on January 2, 1986 to Geoffrey Keating, the Irish Chargé d’Affaires in Rome, by Monsignor Diarmuid Martin (as the present Archbishop of…
Christmas is now generally a time of universal celebration and festivity. But the days after the Nativity were different: after the joy of the new child came cruelty and persecution. As always the Bible is pervaded by a sense of the reality of human affairs that people, swept away by sentiment, so often overlook: cruel…
Christmas time is one of the great books buying season of the year. For children and young adults especially the shops are filled with a bonanza of books, of all kinds for all kinds of taste. While it is said that girls take more easily to reading, they often prefer story books about girls,…
At this time of the year the bookshops are filled with books of all kinds, a great many simply produced for immediate seasonal sale, with little hope that they will be of any lasting value to anyone in the months, let alone the years to come. However, among these daunting piles of printed paper for…
A True Symbol of the City of Dublin – The Ha’penny Bridge Dublin by Michael English and others (Dublin City Council, €24.95pb / €34.95hb)
“Ancient Sweet Donoughmore”: Life in an Irish rural parish to 1900 by Gerard O’Rourke (Redmond Grove Publications, €35.00 including p+p)
It is As it Is: a True Story of Hope Loss and Friendship by Malina Stahre-Godycka (Veritas, €14.99)
The World of Books
Great Irish Lives: Obituaries of Ireland’s Finest edited by Charles Lysaght (Times Books / HarperCollins, £12.99)