Many readers who find many of today’s novels present them with a problem, will find many titles that they long to reread (which is the real pleasure of all reading), or have heard of, but which never come their way, which are hard to find in libraries, will be delighted by what they can find…
Gaza, so much in the news recently, is one of the world’s oldest cities, though one might not believe this from what one reads or hears about it today in the media. Gaza, which lies 50 miles or so south-south-west of Jerusalem, was in antiquity a great Philistine city and fortress, often mentioned in the…
Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age by Joseph Minich, foreword by Carl R. Trueman (Lexham Press, €25/ $29 / £21) How did we, in the West, move from a world in which belief in God was the default position to one in which it is an option among others? Charles Taylor’s The…
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier, with a new afterword (Vintage, £9.99 / €12.60) The author of this book would, I think, regard this ambition as the start of a race to the bottom. Jaron Lanier is a Jeremiah of the internet who has emerged directly from Silicon Valley.…
The Power of Thank You: Discover the God of Gratitude by Joyce Meyer (Hodder and Stoughton, £9.99 / €11.99) Each moment that you’re given,” Joyce Meyer writes, “is a precious gift from God.” How often were we told when small to ‘say thank’ on so many occasions? But how little it affects the adult world. Many are…
An exhibition by Anthony Kelly, Seán McCrum, Peter Reid, and Paddy Sammon in the Irish Architectural Archives, 45 Merrion Square; run to 29 March 2024; free The Ariège is a French department that lies in the Pyrenees between Carcassonne and the mountain state of Andorra. It is one of the least populated regions of France,…
St Brigid was recognised from an early date as one of the ‘Three Patrons of Ireland’. Born of the Celtic nobility, in Irish history and legend she has always held a premier place; and yet about her life and achievement there has always been, because of her early date, so soon after St Patrick, both…
The Great Dreamer: The Life and Mission of St Francis Xavier by Brendan Comerford (Messenger Publications, €12.95 / £11.95) St Francis Xavier is among the most celebrated of the original body of Jesuits. He has been the subject of many biographies and devotional books in the past – the author mentions some of them on…
Tim Pat Coogan, my former boss as editor of the Irish Press, singles out in his book Ireland in the Twentieth Century, Sean Lemass and TK Whitaker as “hinge” figures between the “old” and the “new” Irelands that emerged in the early 1960s. Lemass, one of the original architects of the Fianna Fáil policy…
Thomas O’Loughlin Gerald O’Donovan: A Life. 1871-1942, by John F. Ryan (Liverpool University Press, £95.00) This book is, to my knowledge, the first full length biography of that most complex character of the late-19th and early 20th Century, Gerald O’Donovan, who is now best remembered for his first novel: Father Ralph, published in April 1913,…
Peter Costello