With cinemas still closed because of lockdown restrictions, websites continue to provide for those of us with a hunger for good movies. One of the most powerful ones I got was Winter Sleep, an epic from Nuri Bilge Ceylan about the problems encountered by a landlord in a small Turkish village after the son of…
So we have, finally, a new Government. It’s often said that if you don’t like a Government you can vote them out in the next election. Well, living through the last few months, you’d be forgiven for wondering about that. As described by presenter Justin McCarthy on last Monday’s Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1), the…
Mainly About Books By the books editor The current protests in the US and the Black Lives Matter campaign that has spread to other countries take my mind back a good way to what was, in effect, my first true contact with American culture. This was on a flight to New York (where a further…
Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph (Simon & Schuster, $30.00/£18.99) Frank Litton In 2015, Pope Francis addressed a joint meeting of the United States’ Congress. He invoked the memory of famous Americans: “The complexities of history not withstanding, these men and women for all their many differences and…
Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come by T. J. Clark (Thames & Hudson, £18.95) British-born writer T. J. Clark is a Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. His main field of interest has been 19th-Century French art, and such artists as Manet and Courbet, so this…
In this series some of our literary collaborators will be giving suggestions for lockdown reading, books of all kinds to enlighten us and raise our spirits. This week: Christopher Moriarty on Charles Darwin’s fundamental belief in a Creator as expressed in his epoch making study The Origin of Species (1859) Millions of Christians to this…
In a recent column, I wrote that I’m never ashamed to be Irish despite reservations about aspects of culture and government policies, but I was certainly proud when, last week, we got a seat on the UN Security Council. The issue was discussed when Samantha Power, former US ambassador to the UN, was interviewed on…
Relatively recently, I mentioned Charles Villiers Stanford in relation to his opera The Veiled Prophet. This spurred me on to delve further into the archives and discover more about the composer born in Dublin’s Herbert Street in 1852. His father, a well-to-do lawyer, John James, was a cellist and noted bass who sang the title…
The Arms Crisis of 1970: The plot that never was by Michael Heney (Head of Zeus, £20.00/€23.00) This important but controversial new book by Michael Heney, published recently in the midst of our present pandemic crisis, challenges the received historical interpretation of the attempt in 1970 to import arms for possible use in Northern Ireland. Rather…
On Marriage, On Birth, On Death (three titles in the series “How to Find God”) by Timothy and Kathy Keller (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99) In this time of peril and stress, when Covid-19 continues to spread across the benighted nations of Africa, many are faced very directly with question of what it is they believe and…
Aubrey Malone
Brendan O’Regan
Peter Costello