In his Master’s Footsteps: The Way of the Cross in the Company of St Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop and Martyr (St Paul’s Publishing, €5.50 / £4.60) This aid to making the Stations of the Cross has been written by Canon Benedict Fee, the parish priest of Clonoe, in Co. Tyrone. It is built around the example…
Stolen Moments by John Quinn (Veritas, €16.99 / £14.50) Over recent years John Quinn’s books have proved popular and for good reason. This new book is a sort of sequel to an earlier book Moments (which appeared back in 2011). In this book I can see why. These days I find I do not sleep quite as…
The story is told, by the Victorian writer H.C. Adams, of a student in the 1870s who was asked by an academic in an early exam in divinity at Oxford, “What is the distance from Bethany to Jerusalem?” “A mile and a half,” was the immediate reply. “I think not sir,” re-joined the examiner: “the…
World of Books Selected by the Books Editor The December and January holiday season is the most important sales period of the year for many publishers and bookshops. The tables in the books-sellers are piled with books of all kinds, many on topics that would get better attention at another time of the year, such…
Books are among the most acceptable gifts we can give to others, especially children. Here is a small selection of what is now available, for young people of all ages, with a reminder too that Christmas is still a religious celebration, whatever the bizarre commercial activities that now surround it. Remember books are not just…
by the Books Editor When they were in doubt about a book to give a child or young person, our parents, grandparents and great grandparents gave a classic and in doing so followed an important tradition. But it is one with for some people disconcerting results. The philosopher L.P. Jacks, the once eminent editor of…
As selected by some of our regular critics Thomas J. Morrisey In a secularised western world we are told that the existence of God has been disproved by science, religious faith is futile superstition, truth is relative, morality is the result of evolution, and there is no absolute right or wrong, that Jesus Christ did…
Albert Reynolds: Risk Taker for Peace by Conor Lenihan (Merrion Press, €22.95/£19.99) Dr. Ciaran Casey With the deadline for my own book on the horizon, I was determined not to commit to any more work. But a request to review Conor Lenihan’s latest book was impossible to resist. His first biography, Haughey: Prince of Power was released…
The Red Prince: The Fall of a Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Europe by Timothy Snyder (The Bodley Head, £20) World War I (1914-1918) swept away the Hapsburg dynasty which for hundreds of years had ruled much of Europe from Vienna as the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon put an end to the Holy Roman…
The World of Books by the books editor The other day I was reading a book by the American palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson about his expedition through part of Patagonia in 1930 in search of fossils. His finds helped recreate an idea of past life; but it was not his comments on geology that caught…
Peter Costello