Dillon Rediscovered: The newspaperman who befriended kings, presidents and oil tycoons, by Kevin Rafter (Martello Publishing, €20/ £16.99) Emile Joseph Dillon, born in Dublin in 1854, seemed from his early youth to be destined to become a Roman Catholic priest. He was the only surviving son of modest, pious parents living close to the quays…
Year in the Woods: Montalto through the Seasons, by Paul Clements (Merrion Books, €18.99/ £17.99) Our relations with the natural world have provided a theme which has engaged people of spirit and sensibility since writing began almost, but certainly in the last few centuries. In receiving this book for review the title at once…
Here in Ireland the recovery in 1993 of a Caravaggio painting from the wall of the dining room of the Jesuit residence in Leeson Street, Dublin, made us all very conscious of this extraordinary artist of the Baroque period. That painting, The Taking of Christ, from 1602, now has a home in the National Gallery, where…
The days the news seems to have, on an almost daily basis, some medical story in prominence: the saga of the Children’s Hospital, crowded Emergency Departments, patients on trolleys for days on end, a lack of beds nationwide, unnecessary operations on children, failures to treat others… It seems to go and on. What perhaps we…
Death in Derry: Martin McGuinness & the Derry IRA’s War against the British by Jonathan Trigg (Merrion Press, €18.99 / £17.99) This is a detailed account of the conflict between the members of the Derry Brigade of the Provisional IRA and the Crown Forces from 1971 onwards. The author is a military historian. Before putting…
This is a book which I suspect anyone who takes an interest in Irish literary history will have heard of, if not already read. It has a small place in Joycean mythology as a passage in it (see ch. XVII) describes a visit made quite by chance in September 1902 by the author and a…
Religion, Landscape & Settlement in Ireland, Kevin Whelan (Four Courts Press, €24.95 / £39.99) The cover of Kevin Whelan’s new book, which shows early Christian beehive cells on the Skelligs, might give the hesitating purchaser the impression that he deals in detail with developments from the introduction of Christianity to Ireland. But in fact the text…
Christ Alive: Reflections from the Shadows of Life into the Light of God, John Deane-O’Keefe (Resource Publications, Eugene, Oregon USA, £19.50; available through Amazon) This is an unusual book. The note on the author tells us that John Deane -O’’Keefe is a church pastor, prison and hospital chaplain, and forensic criminologist. This suggests a rare…
Michaelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, Ross King (Pimlico, £9.99) Quite by chance I was reading this book at the time the Conclave began. I thought it would be interesting to make the decorations of the Sistine Chapel the focus of some reflections on the election of the Pope. But like the rest of the world I…
Seamus Cashman Plenitude, by Thomas McCarthy (Carcanet Press, £11.99 / €14.99) Tom McCarthy’s new collection Plenitude has that centrality of ‘pleasure’ and ‘vocation’ at the heart of poetry’s creative energies which Auden once alluded to, as indeed do so many of his recent prose works. Plenitude completes a trilogy of collections, the previous books are Pandemonium (2016) and Prophecy (2019), all…
Peter Costello