Discovering St Patrick, by Thomas O’Loughlin (Darton, Longman & Todd, €15.00 / £10.95) St Patrick is universally identified with Ireland and the Irish. St Patrick’s Day is one of those few festivals that are celebrated around the world, so much so that it has become more of a carnival than a mere religious feast…
Ireland’s Curious Places: 100 fascinating, lesser-known treasures to discover, by Michael Fewer (Gill Books, €16.99 / £14.99) Irish Fairy Forts: Portals to the Past, by Jo Kerrigan and Richard Mills (O’Brien Books, €19.99 / £17.99) What with the effects of climate change and the rising objections to mass tourism around the world, it is…
Notre-Dame de Paris, by Victor Hugo, newly translated from the French with an introduction by John Sturrock (Penguin Classics, €13.99) After its formal reopening at the end of last year, Notre Dame cathedral in Paris this summer returned, after those dark years of closure, to its place as the most popular tourist attraction in…
No One Was Paying Any Attention to the Sky: Flannery O’Connor and Modernity, by Damian Ference (Wiseblood books, US$11.00 / €9.50) Flannery O’Connor was a remarkable writer, who was born and passed her short life in the state of Georgia, a region beset by its “Southern Gothic” heritage, a history of slavery and passionate division,…
Drawn not Driven: Pilgrim of Life’s Beckonings, by Warren Ford (Red Feather Publishing, 2025). This is a fascinating autobiography, a wide ranging account of an Australian . The author, Warren Ford, was born in Western Australia on 23 January 1942. He attended the elementary convent school of St Aloysius conducted by the Mercy Sisters…
Driven by the Monsoons: Through the Indian Ocean and the Seas of China, by Barry Cunliffe (Oxford University Press, £30.00 / € 42.00) Barry Cunliffe, now Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at Oxford University, is one of the most distinguished archaeologists of his generation. He is known not just as an excavator, but also as…
Christopher Hill: The life of a radical historian, by Michael Braddick (London: Verso Press, £35.00 / €42.95) Though I occasionally met Christopher Hill (1912 -2002), he was, as the author of this thoughtful study attests, as reserved within his kindly and courteous public demeanour as to have left me with little sense of his actual…
Is Ireland a racist country? Based on my experience it is not, but no doubt there are racists among us. Recently The Irish Catholic had a headline about Indian Catholics being the target of abuse, which led to a wider discussion. On Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) Archbishop of Dublin, Dermot Farrell, spoke of…
The Secret Life of Cows Rosamund Young, with a foreword by Alan Bennett Faber and Faber. £9.99 / €11.99 The Wisdom of Sheep and Other Animals Rosamund Young Faber and Faber, £7.99 / €9.50 Here in Ireland we are well aware of the importance of cattle to our history – is not the Gaelic…
Cold Porridge, Broken Promises and a Missing Dog: Notes from Nursing Home Advocacy Tony Carroll Scribe Consulting Services, €20.00 / £18.99; widely available on line and through shops It is something of a surprise that this deeply felt and engaging book had to be self-published, rather than appear from under one of the well known imprints.…
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan