Social Life in Pre-Reformation Dublin 1450-1540 by Peadar Slattery (Four Courts Press, €45.00) Recently I was involved, in quite another capacity, in raising money for the purchase for the Trinity College Research collections of a fugitive manuscript from St Mary’s Abbey in Dublin, liquidated at the time of the Reformation. This brought to my…
Glenstal Abbey through the seasons with photographs by Valerie O’Sullivan, edited by Colman Ó Clabaigh OSB (Columba Books, €24.99) Through pictures and text this beautiful book captures the life of one of Ireland’s most famous abbeys. At the heart of it all is an annual round of worship, prayer and reflection. But this is also…
The Education of an Idealist Samantha Power (William Collins, £20/€25) Felix M. Larkin Samantha Power knows how to tell a story well, and what a story she has to tell in this autobiography. Born in London in 1970 to Irish parents – a dentist and a medical doctor – and raised in Ireland until she…
Mainly about books by the books editor St Mary’s Abbey in Dublin was founded, according to the Annals of the Four Masters, in 846. Over the coming centuries it in grew in size into an important ecclesiastical institution, eventually holding the country’s largest library. The nature of such places began to change with the arrival…
Irish Catholic readers should be able to wallow in a bit of nostalgia! On Wednesday of last week I happened upon The Dick Powell Theatre on satellite movie channel Talking Pictures TV (TPTV). It was an innovative TV drama show in its day (early 1960s) – a TV series of one-off dramas. This particular episode…
Defending Trinity College Dublin, Easter 1916: Anzacs and the Rising by Rory Sweetman (Four Courts Press, €19.99) Dr Rory Sweetman is a Kildare-born New Zealander who studied at Trinity College Dublin and Cambridge University, and has has written extensively on aspects of the Irish abroad. He is the author of Bishop in the Dock: the…
The recent canonisation by Pope Francis of St John Henry Newman, responsible for the building of University Church, an artistic gem erected in the garden of 87 St Stephen’s Green in Dublin, has turned my attention again to the saint’s The Dream of Gerontius. In the 1865 seven-phase poem the elderly Gerontius – his name…
A Perfect Peace: Newman Saint for Our Time by Bishop Fintan Monahan (Veritas, €7.99) Newman: A short Biography by Michael Collins(Messenger Publications, €9.95) The canonisation of John Henry Newman last Sunday had brought his life and spirituality before a great many people who were perhaps only vaguely aware of their true complexity. Many of these…
The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: A Biography by Carlos Eire (Princeton University Press, £21.00) The Autobiography of Teresa of Avila is a rightly famous book, and remains widely read. But the title is slightly misleading, for the text was composed not at the free volition of the saint herself, but at the insistence…
The Cockroach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape, £7.99/€11.00) Felix M. Larkin Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, it often seems that events have overtaken satire – indeed, have made satire redundant. However, the distinguished author of such contemporary masterpieces as Atonement and Amsterdam, Ian McEwan has produced a novella which will stand as the definitive…
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan