The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms Translated by Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous (Hurst, £20.00) I have promised myself that should I win the lottery, I would employ an ‘explainer’. There is so much about the modern world that I do not ‘get’. And it is not only TV advertisements and…

  The big summer exhibition at the Ulster Museum in Belfast this year will be the exhibition of two important Caravaggio’s together for the first time in centuries. One is from the National Gallery in London, The Supper at Emmaus (1601); the other is lent by the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, the now…

With Dante you do not just enter a poet’s world, but a poet’s cosmos. Hell is defined by theologians as a place or state of punishment. Dante, Doré, and others present visions of the place, but the state of hell may be something very different to what they have so generously imagined. Flann O’Brien more…

Last week the annual Pan Celtic Festival was held in Carlow last week. With groups of musicians, singers and dancers it is a notably vital occasion, at which Celtic culture from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and Spain are on display. Celtic culture in its several varieties spreads from the Outer Isles of Scotland along…

These two very different books explore aspects of the same centuries long tradition in European architecture, which by extension into the colonies abroad, means worldwide. It is a tradition which has left its mark in many places in the form of classical style churches, which with many public buildings and private mansions, form an important…

Going for Glory, Irish Style Chasing Sam Maguire; The All-Ireland Football Championship 1928-1977 by Dermot Reilly and Colm Keys, foreword  by Larry McCarthy  (The O’Brien Press, €34.99 /  £32.99) This is a comprehensive account of the All-Ireland Senior Football finals from 1928 to 1977.  On each occasion the teams competed for the Sam Maguire Cup.…

  Easter being the most important feast day in the Christian calendar has always attracted artists. Each incident of Holy Week from the Last Supper, the arrest in the garden, the trial before Pontius Pilate, the denials by Peter, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the women at the empty tomb: each of these has been the…

  Thomas McCarthy Few poets have written with the intensity and seriousness of Aidan Mathews; and fewer still have sustained that intensity over a career of five collections, six books of prose and six plays. This heroic, wide ranging and always engaged achievement belies the poet’s character which has seemed at all times evasive, ironic…

Rev. Robert Marshall The opening paragraph of the editors’ introduction notes that “Ireland’s centuries old reputation as a land of saints and scholars (and sinners) is well established”. They continue that two decades into the 21st Century the island’s association with religious devotion is increasingly considered something of an historic artefact – a kind expression…