Dublin: The Chaos Years by Neil Cotter (Penguin Ireland, €18) This is a refreshingly honest account of the interactions between the managers, players and fans of the Dublin senior football team from 1996 to 2010.  It records the behind-the-scenes abuse, backchat, disloyalty and other challenges faced by the managers of that period. Pat O’Neill led the…

Mainly About Books by the books editor   Travelling round the city as I do, largely by bus and tram, and graced with the benefit of not carrying any kind of phone or tablet, I have the leisure to observe other people’s interaction with their media devices. I find it very suggestive, and believe that…

The International Eucharistic Congresses:
A Spiritual Odyssey: 1881-2016 by John Francis Allen (Gracewing, £20.00) When the Eucharistic Congresses were held in Ireland it was the public events that attracted the attention of the commentators at the time and of historians since. But as the author of this valuable book makes clear, the Congresses also have a scholarly…

The Mystical Imagination of Patrick Kavanagh: A Buttonhole in Heaven by Una Agnew (Veritas, €16.99) This is a new and enlarged edition of an important book first issued over a decade ago. For a work of literary criticism this is an unusual thing, but then for many readers what Sr Agnew has to say about the…

Falling for a Farmer by Maura McElhone (Mercier Press, €14.99) In this beautifully written memoir Maura McElhone presents a perceptive mirror both to life on the farm and life in 21st-Century Ireland. This she achieves in a romantic tale about herself and a farmer, named Jack. Maura, a native of Portstewart in Co. Derry, was educated…

Saint Patrick: An Ancient Saint for Modern Times by Edmond Grace SJ (Sacred Heart Messenger, €4.95) At this time of the year we Irish tend to think of St Patrick as ‘our saint’, but Edmund Grace begins his brief book with a very insightful encounter far from Ireland. In St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York he…

Nathaniel Hone: Travels of a Landscape Artist National Gallery of Ireland 
23 February–1 December 2019 After Nathaniel Hone the younger died in 1917 his wife donated to the National Gallery some 500 works of art: it took until the 1950s to catalogue them all. Most of us have an image of Hone as the creator…

Thomas Cromwell: A Life by Diarmaid MacCulloch (Allen Lane, €35) Robert
 Marshall   “The evil that men do lives after them, / the good is oft interred with their bones…’  This apposite quotation from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar comes to mind when reflecting on this magisterial book written by Diarmaid MacCulloch about the life of Thomas Cromwell (1485 c.-1540). MacCulloch is professor…

Ways to go Beyond and why they Work by Rupert Sheldrake (Coronet, £20.00/€23.00) Christopher Moriarty   In his preface, Rupert Sheldrake introduces himself as a research worker who is making a substantial contribution to the human knowledge that he calls “mundane”. He means the facts relating to our material world, which can be ascertained by…

Mainly about Books by the Books Editor   It has long amazed me the amount of abuse that creationists and many evangelicals heap upon the head of Charles Darwin. Much of what is said is simply wrongheaded, or relies on over simplistic interpretations of the Book of Genesis (one of the most challenging books of the Bible…