The Bible in One Year, New International Version read by David Suchet CBE (Hodder and Stoughton, £29.99; also available as a digital download) David Suchet is one of the popular and talented actors of his time, famous for in incarnation of Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective Poirot (whose ‘little grey cells’ were informed by the conscience…

Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Malcolm Guite (Hodder and Stoughton, £25.00) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are two poems known in some way to anyone anywhere who reads English.  Yet there was more to Samuel Taylor Coleridge than these and a handful of other poems. He was also …

Andrew Carpenter Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel by John Stubbs (Viking, £25) It is hard to know what to expect from a new biography of Swift so soon after Leo Damrosch’s massive Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (Yale University Press, £10.99pb) in 2013, especially if the latest book  is clearly designed for the…

The Editor Regrets… by James Good  (Lettertec; copies from the author, Parkview, Church Street, Douglas, Cork) Ah yes, what novice contributor to the press has not received one of those rejection slips that give Fr James Good of Cork the title of his collection of essays, largely unpublished? As his own publisher, Fr Good can…

Friend of the Poor. Mary Aikenhead: Woman of Vision, Commitment and Inspiration by Rosaleen Crossan (Columba Press, €12.99) Pope Francis declared Mary Aikenhead to be Venerable on March 18, 2015. This is the first step towards canonisation. It was a much deserved accolade. Mary was born in Cork on January 19, 1787. Her father, David…

Michael McDowell SC The Ireland of Edward Cahill SJ 1864-1941: A Secular or a Christian State? by Dr Thomas J Morrissey SJ (Messenger Publications, €19.99) Dr Thomas Morrissey, himself a Jesuit priest, has chosen for his latest work of historical biography one of the foremost Jesuit proponents of the Catholic Action Movement in Ireland between…

The Nugents of Westmeath & Queen Elizabeth’s Irish Primer by Denis Casey (Four Courts Press, €9.95) The Nugent family trace their beginning to Gilbert de Nugent of Normandy, the 1st Baron of Delvin, who arrived in Ireland in the 12th Century.  By the middle of the 16th Century they were well and truly Anglo-Irish. At…

Mindful Meditations for Every Day by Sr Stan (Columba Press, €12.99) In Ireland, Sr Stanislaus Kennedy has long been much admired. One of the surprises among the releases of State papers at the turn of the year, as least to this reviewer, was a file dealing with the proposal put to the government that it…

World of Books These days we have little expectation of astonishing works of literature or scholarship from a bishop. They are all too busy with mere administration to have the mental energy to expend on scholarship or literature. It was not always thus. Look for instance at the writings of 19th-Century Irish bishops, such as…

Joe Carroll The Supreme Court. The judges, the decisions, the rifts and the rivalries that have shaped Ireland by Ruadhán Mac Cormaic (Penguin Ireland, €27.99) “We are the Supreme Court and under God we can do anything,” a judge of the court, Cecil Lavery, rebuked a young barrister who had the nerve to tell the…