Matt Talbot: An Introduction (Veritas, €4.99) Though this little book is unsigned on the title page, it is actually extracted from Mary Purcell’s Remembering Matt Talbot published in 1954. Mary Purcell was once a well known writer and her authorship should be recognised on the title page. When local veneration of Matt Talbot began to…
At the time of the election in the USA I wrote that I had a sense of dread with Donald Trump becoming President. I wouldn’t have been happy with Hilary Clinton getting the job either, and wondered how such a vast country with such potential couldn’t produce better than those two candidates. My sense of…
An Inconvenient Sequel (PG) He walks like John Wayne. He talks like Dr Phil. Who is he? He’s Al Gore, the man who once said, “I used to be the next President of the United States.” That didn’t happen but something else did. He found a life outside politics. A life of lecturing on ecology,…
The Nuns of Saint’ Ambrogio: The True Story of a Covent Scandal By Hubert Wolf (Oxford University Press, £20.00) When the Church these days is besieged by scandal many seem to think that in previous generations things were different. They were certainly different, but in the sense of being far worse, as this book, by…
The Church of St Aengus, Burt, Co. Donegal: Celebrating Half century (1967-2017) ed. by Donal Campbell and others To mark the first 50 years of their church a group in Fahan, Co. Donegal, have produced a fine illustrated book which celebrates not just the church, its architect and its building, but the whole span of…
Teresa Whitington The Boy behind the curtain: notes from an Australian life by Tim Winton (Picador £16.99) When he was nine years old, Tim Winton travelled by car with his family from Western to Eastern Australia: from the city of Perth to the city of Melbourne. One of the institutions the family visited was the…
I have been a reader of books of travel and exploration since I was 10 or so – by which I mean real explorers and not the self-advertising egomaniacs so common today. Books by giants of science and endeavour, such as Marco Polo, Livingstone, Sir Richard Burton, Humboldt, Waterton (an old Stonyhurst boy) and others,…
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation edited by Peter Marshall (Oxford University Press, £18.99pb RPP) Peter Marshall, the editor of this book, is professor of history at Warwick and on the board of the journal British Catholic History. With six colleagues he provides an approachable résumé, very well illustrated with vivid and relevant images,…
“Romantic England’s dead and gone,” says Steven Patrick Morrissey, deliberately misquoting Yeats in this engrossing biopic, “it’s with Jane Austen in the grave”. Elsewhere his mother makes a wallpaper joke about his hero Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s reputed last words, remember, were: “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.” These are just two of the (unexplained)…
What I like about Sunday Sequence (BBC Radio Ulster) is the wide variety of topics and contributors. Last Sunday’s edition had several worthwhile topics covered even in the first half hour. There was an analysis of the current political troubles in resource-rich Venezuela, outlining the Church’s mediation attempts and its difficulty in avoiding manipulation by…
Brendan O’Regan
Aubrey Malone
Peter Costello