Ian d’Alton The social history of modern Ireland Edited by Eugenio F. Balgini & Mary E. Daly (Cambridge University Press, £24.99) This substantial and weighty (literally – it’s 635 pages come in at a little under 3lbs) is self-described as a textbook.  This does it both justice and injustice.  The textbook element – the extraordinary…

Matt Talbot: An Introduction (Veritas, €4.99) Though this little book is unsigned on the title page, it is actually extracted from Mary Purcell’s Remembering Matt Talbot published in 1954. Mary Purcell was once a well known writer and her authorship should be recognised on the title page. When local veneration of Matt Talbot began to…

The Nuns of Saint’ Ambrogio: The True Story of a Covent Scandal By Hubert Wolf (Oxford University Press, £20.00) When the Church these days is besieged by scandal many seem to think that in previous generations things were different. They were certainly different, but in the sense of being far worse, as this book, by…

The Church of St Aengus, Burt, Co. Donegal: Celebrating Half century (1967-2017) ed. by Donal Campbell and others To mark the first 50 years of their church a group in Fahan, Co. Donegal, have produced a fine illustrated book which celebrates not just the church, its architect and its building, but the whole span of…

Teresa Whitington The Boy behind the curtain: notes from an Australian life by Tim Winton (Picador £16.99) When he was nine years old, Tim Winton travelled by car with his family from Western to Eastern Australia: from the city of Perth to the city of Melbourne. One of the institutions the family visited was the…

I have been a reader of books of travel and exploration since I was 10 or so – by which I mean real explorers and not the self-advertising egomaniacs so common today. Books by giants of science and endeavour, such as Marco Polo, Livingstone, Sir Richard Burton, Humboldt, Waterton (an old Stonyhurst boy) and others,…

The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation edited by Peter Marshall (Oxford University Press, £18.99pb RPP) Peter Marshall, the editor of this book, is professor of history at Warwick and on the board of the journal British Catholic History. With six colleagues he provides an approachable résumé, very well illustrated with vivid and relevant images,…

Ireland’s nuns have not been getting much respect of late, for reason that painful headlines make only too clear. But in all this controversy some things are lost sight of. Critics seem to think that the Church took over institutions that ought to have been run by the state; but the truth is that if…

Joe Carroll When World War II broke out in September 1939, it left many hundreds, possibly more than a thousand Irish men and women living in France with a dilemma; whether to seek refuge in neutral Éire or hold on to see what would happen. For those who were still there following the fall of…

Terrorism has horrific consequences. Among these consequences, and frequently not adverted to, are lack of respect for the truth, the undermining of the rule of law and the obstruction of justice. In this remarkable study the author, who has specialised in criminal law in England, Wales and Ireland since 1966, details how consequences such as…