Category: Books

Between one war and another: Four days in June 1921

Truce: Murder, myth and the last days of the Irish war of independence by Padráig Óg Ó Ruairc (Mercier Press, Cork, €17.99) Ian D’Alton The Irish Revolution industry marches on. This book is somewhat ahead of the centenary of the events it chronicles, so it is almost a welcome diversion from the veritable tsunami of books about…

T.S. Eliot: The years of growth

Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford (Jonathan Cape, €31.50 hb) John Wyse Jackson The two most important early works of modernist literature were published in the same year, 1922: Ulysses, by James Joyce, and The Waste Land, by T S Eliot. Both writers are still widely read and studied, and…

President Griffith: A greater man than many think

Arthur Griffith by Owen McGee (Merrion Press, €27.00) Colum Kenny Arthur Griffith, the first president of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State in 1922, deserves more respect than he gets. This intriguing and polemical volume will help to redress the balance. Born in Dominick Street in 1872, and having shared the hardships of so…

Recent books in brief

Journey of Love: Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle, a Readers Guide by Eugene McCaffrey OCD, with a foreword by Vincent O’Hara OCD  (Teresian Press, £4.00; www.carmelitebooks.com). The author is well known from his talks, retreats and his writings on St Teresa, largely at Avila in Dublin where he is based. This little book, written for…

The World of Books

The hidden past of Viking Dublin A few weeks before Christmas, there was published what was among the most important Irish books of last year. This was Patrick Wallace’s Viking Dublin: The Wood Quay Excavations (Irish Academic Press, €60.00 hb), the final magisterial report on archaeological investigations into Viking Dublin, which began in Christ Church Place…

The Republicans who killed the King of England

Killers of the King: the men who dared to execute Charles I by Charles Spencer (Bloomsbury, £8.99pb) J. Anthony Gaughan  A book by Princess Diana’s brother would be certain to be of wide interest. But in this account of the vengeance that pursued the men who ordered the death of Charles I he has found…

Beyond the Easter event

The Passion and the Cross by Ronald Rolheiser (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99 hb) Lent approaches, and many will be looking round for a book which will provide them with reading during the weeks to Good Friday and Easter. For readers of this paper, and for the many other publications where his columns are syndicated around…

New light is cast on the Knights Templar

Soldiers of Christ: The Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar in Medieval Ireland ed. Martin Browne OSB and Colmán Ó Clabaigh OSB (Four Courts Press, €50.00 hb) Ever since the controversy over The Da Vinci Code the Knights Templar have become a stock item in books from  ‘alternative historians’ who have produced so many strange…

St Augustine – a living presence

Augustine: Conversions and Confessions by Robin Lane Fox (Allen Lane, £30.00) In the history of Western civilisation St Augustine has a special place. Just how special many may not realise. In any academic library the works of the Greek and Latin Fathers in their original (say in the standard edition of Migne) occupy a great…