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…

Our economies may be in recovery, but they are far from healthy, warns Bill Emmott, who writes with the authority and assurance of a former editor-in-chief of The Economist. He believes that the most insidious of the ‘enemies that lie within’ is the swollen, still largely unregulated financial services sector, that was responsible for the…

For many years, Kenny’s Bookshop has been one of the features of Galway City.  Des Kenny describes here the beginnings of that mecca for bibliophiles – now only run on-line. Maureen Canning and Des Kenny met for the first time when she was attending University College, Galway.  Within a few years they married and opened…

The release of Dunkirk has been the focus for mixed reviews and divided opinions. Christopher Nolan’s movie with its clean-shaven, well-washed, un-muddied British  soldiers retreating with their weapons still in hand, though loved by critics, has been derided by veterans of WWII as a travesty. To see Dunkirk merely as an “heroic retreat” is to…

Nick Page is the author of some 70 popular books in the area of religion, written from a quirky Protestant point of view. This is suggested by his subtitle: “Commemorating 500 years of Popes, Protestants, reformers, radicals and other assorted irritants”. He begins by pointing out that the first historian of the Reformation, a servant…