My Campaign in Ireland Part II: My Connection with the Catholic University, by John Henry Newman, with an introduction and notes by Paul Shrimpton [Newman Millennium Edition, volume XVII] (Gracewing, £35.00 / €40.00) For Catholics it may be enough that John Henry Newman is now canonised. But this in a way is a limitation on…
Dr Thomas O’Loughlin Anyone who sees a loaf of bread and slices it knows that there is something very basic about this foodstuff and this action of dividing it. Bread, so the saying goes, is “the staff of life”. But bread comes to us as loaves, and when we cut them up there is an…
An exhibition at both the RDS and the RIA Though many people may be unfamiliar with the libraries of the Royal Dublin Society or of the Royal Irish Academy, both founded in the mid-18th Century, these hallowed institutions are currently mounting in succession a small but very interesting exhibition relating to the Dublin Great Industrial…
A Love Surpassing Knowledge: The Spirituality of Edward King, by Michael Marshall, with a foreword by Archbishop Stephen Cottrell (Gracewing, £14.99) Gracewing for over 30 years has been providing books that explore aspects of Catholicism. But now they are broad minded enough editorially to find Catholicism outside the Catholic Church. Victorian Britain was the era…
Penelope Unbound, by Mary Morrissy (Banshee Press, €15.00) When James Joyce and Nora Barnacle arrived in Trieste in 1904, Joyce left his inamorata sitting outside the railway station with their meagre luggage while he went into the city to find accommodation for them. In the city centre he intervened in a quarrel between some…
Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I?, by Timothy Keller (Hodder & Stoughton, £10.00/€12.99) On May 19 this year, Pastor Timothy Keller died at his Manhattan home of pancreatic cancer. He was the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, and a widely read best-selling Christian writer. He did not care to…
Kathy White House: Kathy Buckley – Her Culinary Odyssey, by Vincent Carmody (€35.00, plus postage and packing, via Fitzsimons Printers Ltd., Shanagolden, Co, Limerick; tel.: 069-76-226; email: info@fitzsimonsprinters.ie). The White House in the US is one of the most storied houses in history. It was built between 1792 and 1800. The architect was Kilkenny-born James…
Quiet Times with God Devotional, by Joyce Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton, £10.00/€12.99) The daily round that we all plan is all too often disrupted by the simple fact that people can so easily communicate and that hour you set aside to make a cake or finally do something about that drain before winter is too…
This year we were told that Halloween was less commercial than past years. This was not my impression, at least in our South Dublin neighbourhood. Having taken my afternoon walks around some of the nearby streets, I was surprised at how early and how generously some of the houses had been decorated. All the usual things…
Sir John Lavery is the sort of painter that people think they have a very clear and exact impression of, based largely on his early society portraits and the many important pieces he produced during Ireland’s revolutionary period, which ended with an image of his wife leaning on a harp gracing the new currency notes of the emergent Irish state.
Peter Costello