Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, by David Hockney (Thames & Hudson, second revised edition, £30.00 / €34.50PB) In the many articles covering the death of British artist David Hockney a fortnight ago, few made mention of an aspect of his thinking that those interested in the difficulties of art history…

Dazzling Darkness: The Lives and Afterlives of the Christian Mystics, by James Harpur (Hurst Books, £25.00 / €30.00) Though these are for many “the times that try men’s souls” – the phrase of an American patriot of a time long past – interest and concern with the extended tradition of Christian mysticism has not declined in the…

The first encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIV opens with a focused expression of what the pontiff has to say: “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” He…

Here is a book which will interest and delight those many viewers who have followed the career of one of the country’s leading broadcasters. Miriam O’Callaghan was born on January 6 at Cornelscourt, Co. Dublin. Her father was a civil servant, her mother was a teacher. Miriam attended St Brigid’s, the local national school in which…

Biographers are usually so busy investigating other people’s lives, as to pay little attention to their own. However, in this revealing book Anne Chambers recounts some of her experiences as a biographer, providing interesting sidelights on Irish writing and publishing. As an account of a long career by a non-fiction writer, it is a rare…

The completion and inauguration of a cathedral is a rare event in modern Europe. Yesterday the Pope was in Barcelona to inaugurate the cathedral of the Holy Family on the centenary of the death of its architect Antoni Gaudi. These two books provide two contrasting biographies for readers. Peter Stanford,  a well known British Catholic…

There are many contested happenings in Irish history – invasion, the conflicts over land, religious hegemony, secularism, the liberal ethic. One that still raises passions and evokes strong opinions is the nature and place of conversionism, or proselytism, in the Irish story. It hits at the heart of who today’s Irish think they are. It…

Mary Kennelly’s first collection, Sunny Spells, Scattered Showers was published in 2004. Since then subsequent books have appeared from a number of Irish publishers. On the Wind and the Singing Tide is her first collection from Salmon Poetry, “one of the most consequential houses in the Irish literary world in the last half century” according…

There are two parts in this book. The first part is a history of the Newell family. The second is a collection of short stories written by Máirtín Ó Tnúthail, one of the most distinguished members of that family, under the nomme de plume ‘Dermot L. Martyn’. These were written in the decades after World…

Some weeks ago, a weekend paper carried a large notice of an art auction due to be held on May 25 in Dublin. One of the pictures caught my wife’s eye: it was a familiar yet different image, a version in water colour of the large oil painting ‘Mass in a Connemara Cottage’ by Aloysius…