Recently our local amateur drama group was courageous enough to mount a production of Dion Boucicault’s Victorian melodrama The Colleen Bawn. I don’t use the word Victorian casually, for this was one of the Queen’s favourite plays; she had drawings she had done of the scenes in her personal art collection. She loved the theatre,…
The Naked Hermit: A journey to the heart of Celtic Britain by Nick Mayhew-Smith (SPCK, £19.99) Readers may recall a six-part television series Britain’s Holiest Places from about seven years ago. This was presented by Nick Mayhew-Smith who had written the book that inspired the programmes of the series. Here, however, he deals with a…
Thomas J. Morrissey ‘The Labour Hercules’: The Irish Citizen Army and Irish Republicanism, 1913-23 by Jeffrey Leddin (Irish Acadmic Press, €24.95) The author’s research and wide reading is evident in relation to the origin, nature, and activity of the Irish Citizen Army from 1913-1923. The book is, perhaps, too specialised for the general reader, but…
Pat O’Kelly Festival is a word that can be abused but with Great Music in Irish Houses I think it can be applied without hesitation. This annual event began in 1970 when it was then, and for many years afterwards, known as the Music in Great Irish Houses Festival. In its initial year it embraced…
Contemplating the Camino – An Ignatian Guide by Brendan McManus SJ (Messenger Publications, €4.95 / £4.50) This little pamphlet is intended not as a guide to the actual trails from France across the north of Spain, so much as an aid to the inner, mystical path of which it is an exemplar. The author takes…
Is there anything funny about the battle between good and evil? Can it be be taken lightly in any context? Even in the world of fantasy fiction? These questions were prompted by the new drama series Good Omens which was launched in its six episode entirety on Amazon Prime last Friday. I binge watched in…
The First Rose of Tralee A novel by Patricia O’Reilly (Poolbeg, €15.99) The fact file on ‘The Rose of Tralee’ claims that the words of the song were composed by Edmund Mordaunt Spencer, the music by Charles William Glover. However local tradition claims that it was written by William Pembroke Mulchinock, a wealthy Protestant, who…
Deeper into the Mess: Praying through Tough Times by Brendan MacManus SJ and Jim Deeds (Messenger Publications, €9.95 / £8.95) This little book is the follow up to the authors’ earlier title Finding God in the Mess. It answers the question readers might have posed: having found God in the mess of life, what do…
Angels: A Visible and Invisible History by Peter Stanford (Hodder & Stoughton, £20.00) “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”: when Hamlet encounters the ghost of his father on the parapet of Elsinore he appeals to the angels to preserve him, which is quite in keeping with the Catholic cast of Shakespeare’s imagination, poised as he…
Breakthrough (12A) In January 2015 a 14-year-old boy called John Smith was playing with two friends on a frozen lake in Missouri when the ice broke and he fell through, hence the title of the film. The term has a secondary religious reverberation because he underwent a kind of spiritual ‘breakthrough’ as well. John was…
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan
Aubrey Malone