Diplomats in Dublin  by Kees van Hoek (The Talbot Press, December 1943)   Recently a relative in New York sent me a slightly battered copy of this book, which is not only of great immediate interest as evidence of just how much Ireland has changed since the “Emergency”, but suggests as well a topic for…

Mystical Crooner: The Lives of Leonard Cohen, by Aubrey Malone (Wisdom Twins Books / Lulu.com, £15.99)     This book by our film critic provides an engaging overview of the complicated career of the Canadian poet, novelist and singer, “a charismatic Jew from Montreal’s French Quarter”. These contending identities provide much of the tension of…

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…