I am grateful for a recent email from Dr Una Hunt telling me that Charles Villiers Stanford’s opera The Veiled Prophet [of Khurassan] is now available to view on the RTÉ Player. The recording was made at last year’s Wexford Festival when David Brophy conducted its single performance. Excepting Polish baritone Simon Mechlieski as the…
I’ve never been that much of a lover of Barbara Streisand’s music or acting but I have been a long-time fan of Leonard Cohen and have fond memories of seeing him perform in Dublin’s 3 Arena. What connects them apart from music is their Jewish heritage and this was explored with Michael Comyn by historian…
Passion Play: Oberammergau 2020 by Christian Tüeckl and others (Theatre der Zeit, £30.00; ISBN-13: 978-3957492845) The village of Oberammergau lies some 45 miles south of Munich in the Tyrol. In many ways it is a remote place, but in time of war and plague, no place is truly remote, in the sense of being totally…
Douglas Hyde: A Maker of Modern Ireland by Janet Egleston Dunleavy & Gareth W. Dunleavy (University of California Press, £48.00) Douglas Hyde/Dubhlas de hÍde served as Ireland’s first president from 1938 to 1945. This was the very highest distinction which the new state and the people of Ireland could bestow. Hyde himself was a man who…
Dream Horse (PG) In these dark times we need a ‘pick me up’ film to revive our spirits – this is it. They say nobody can celebrate like the Irish. Is that because we win less things than the bigger nations? As such it means more. After seeing this wistful elegy to an affectionate…
The Jewel in the Mess by Alan Abernethy (Columba Books, €12.99 / £12.99) Out of danger comes hope: this is the theme of the Church of Ireland Bishop of Down and Connor’s new book. He has suffered in recent years from depression and well as prostate cancer. But in these dark hours he has recovered a…
This August a new feature film, Fatima, is due in cinemas. It stars Harvey Keitel and the trailers look really interesting. Readers may well remember the 1952 version, The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, starring Gilbert Roland. I saw it years ago and was impressed. The 13th Day (EWTN, Sunday) from 2009 was another…
The Autobiography of William Carleton with a foreword by Benedict Kiely (The White Row Press, 1996; other editions are now available on line). This is the unfinished autobiography of William Carleton. Although it ends well short of when he died on January 30, 1869, together with his other writings, it is an important source for the…
Dark Enchantment by Dorothy Macardle (Tramp Press, Recovered Voices Series, No.6) Teresa Whitington Dorothy Macardle has been primarily associated with her 1937 partisan history The Irish Republic, written at Eamon de Valera’s request to give an account of the independence struggle from the anti-treaty side. In so far as the novelist Dorothy Macardle is known,…
A Quiet Tide by Marianne Lee (New Island Books, €14.95) Felix M. Larkin Ellen Hutchins (1785-1815) is described in the Dictionary of Irish Biography as “one of the earliest Irish women scientists…an avid collector of plants, especially the mosses, bryophytes, fungi and lichens around the family home on Bantry Bay”. Though she never published anything…
Brendan O’Regan
Peter Costello
Aubrey Malone