At Eternity’s Gate (12A) Hollywood has never really understood artists. Kirk Douglas won an Oscar nomination for essaying the role of Vincent van Gogh in Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life in 1956 but his performance was way over the top. Jacques Dutronc presented him in a much more nuanced manner in Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh in 1991.…
Anybody watching St Patrick’s Day festivities with a thoughtful eye last weekend must have wondered what exactly was being celebrated. Was it Irishness? Maybe so, but that’s missing the point of the day in spectacular fashion: St Patrick’s Day is, after all, a celebration of the gift that Patrick and other missionaries brought to Ireland,…
One of the biggest media stories of the week was the massacre at the mosques in New Zealand, and among the hours of coverage I heard a few items that hit the right tone. I was impressed by the host’s interview with New Zealand’s ambassador on Saturday with Cormac Ó hEadhra (RTÉ Radio 1) last…
Buck Whaley: Ireland’s greatest adventurer by David Ryan (Merrion Press, €16.95 / £14.99) Andrew Carpenter This is a highly entertaining, well-written account of the life of one of 18th-Century Ireland’s most famous characters, Thomas ‘Buck’ Whaley. Born into a wealthy Anglo-Irish landowning family in 1765 – he was the heir of landowner, magistrate and former Member…
Saint Patrick: The Legends and History of Ireland’s Patron Saint by Roy Flechner (Princeton University Press, £22.00) The feast of Ireland’s national apostle is upon us, in all its curious modern forms. And here just in time for the world-wide celebrations is a new inquiry into the history and the legends that surround St Patrick. But…
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 onset of Lent usually prompts some extra interest in religion in the media, however short lived. Ivan Yates had a fairly positive coverage of Ash Wednesday, on his show The Hard Shoulder (Newstalk). He said he had seen lots of people with ashes on their foreheads in Dublin during the day, though roving reporter…
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…
Pat O’Kelly New Music Dublin, cancelled in 2018 due to weather, then partially salvaged last September resurrected itself at the beginning of this month for an action-packed weekend. However, one would require exceptional stamina to cover the broad spectrum of its endeavours. As festival director John Harris commented, “the range of music being performed…
Aubrey Malone
Greg Daly
Brendan O’Regan
Peter Costello