Jesus Through Muslim Eyes by Richard Shumack (SPCK, £12.99) The other day, before I started on Jesus Through Muslim Eyes, I read in a 1957 book of travels through North Africa from Tunis to Cairo that in Beja, a remote village near the Libyan-Tunisian border, the mosque was dedicated to Jesus Christ. It surprised the author…
The Museum Building of Trinity College: A Model of Victorian Craftsmanship by Christine Casey and Patrick Wyse Jackson (Four Courts Press, €45) Christopher Moriarty Now is a fitting time to browse an extraordinary book about an extraordinary building. Created in 1857, the Museum Building of Trinity College, Dublin has been a familiar object to generations of…
Really Rotten Rhymes poems by Gabriel Fitzmaurice, illustrations by Alice Coleman (Mercier Press, €14.99/£13.99) This is a book filled with the rude vitality of childhood, with equal measures of both qualities. It makes a wonderful read for those who have children still around them, or can remember anything at all of their own early years. This…
With cinemas still closed because of lockdown restrictions, websites continue to provide for those of us with a hunger for good movies. One of the most powerful ones I got was Winter Sleep, an epic from Nuri Bilge Ceylan about the problems encountered by a landlord in a small Turkish village after the son of…
So we have, finally, a new Government. It’s often said that if you don’t like a Government you can vote them out in the next election. Well, living through the last few months, you’d be forgiven for wondering about that. As described by presenter Justin McCarthy on last Monday’s Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1), the…
Mainly About Books By the books editor The current protests in the US and the Black Lives Matter campaign that has spread to other countries take my mind back a good way to what was, in effect, my first true contact with American culture. This was on a flight to New York (where a further…
Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph (Simon & Schuster, $30.00/£18.99) Frank Litton In 2015, Pope Francis addressed a joint meeting of the United States’ Congress. He invoked the memory of famous Americans: “The complexities of history not withstanding, these men and women for all their many differences and…
Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come by T. J. Clark (Thames & Hudson, £18.95) British-born writer T. J. Clark is a Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. His main field of interest has been 19th-Century French art, and such artists as Manet and Courbet, so this…
In this series some of our literary collaborators will be giving suggestions for lockdown reading, books of all kinds to enlighten us and raise our spirits. This week: Christopher Moriarty on Charles Darwin’s fundamental belief in a Creator as expressed in his epoch making study The Origin of Species (1859) Millions of Christians to this…
In a recent column, I wrote that I’m never ashamed to be Irish despite reservations about aspects of culture and government policies, but I was certainly proud when, last week, we got a seat on the UN Security Council. The issue was discussed when Samantha Power, former US ambassador to the UN, was interviewed on…
Peter Costello
Aubrey Malone
Brendan O’Regan