Mainly About Books by the books editor Travelling round the city as I do, largely by bus and tram, and graced with the benefit of not carrying any kind of phone or tablet, I have the leisure to observe other people’s interaction with their media devices. I find it very suggestive, and believe that…
The onset of Lent usually prompts some extra interest in religion in the media, however short lived. Ivan Yates had a fairly positive coverage of Ash Wednesday, on his show The Hard Shoulder (Newstalk). He said he had seen lots of people with ashes on their foreheads in Dublin during the day, though roving reporter…
The International Eucharistic Congresses: A Spiritual Odyssey: 1881-2016 by John Francis Allen (Gracewing, £20.00) When the Eucharistic Congresses were held in Ireland it was the public events that attracted the attention of the commentators at the time and of historians since. But as the author of this valuable book makes clear, the Congresses also have a scholarly…
Pat O’Kelly New Music Dublin, cancelled in 2018 due to weather, then partially salvaged last September resurrected itself at the beginning of this month for an action-packed weekend. However, one would require exceptional stamina to cover the broad spectrum of its endeavours. As festival director John Harris commented, “the range of music being performed…
The Mystical Imagination of Patrick Kavanagh: A Buttonhole in Heaven by Una Agnew (Veritas, €16.99) This is a new and enlarged edition of an important book first issued over a decade ago. For a work of literary criticism this is an unusual thing, but then for many readers what Sr Agnew has to say about the…
Falling for a Farmer by Maura McElhone (Mercier Press, €14.99) In this beautifully written memoir Maura McElhone presents a perceptive mirror both to life on the farm and life in 21st-Century Ireland. This she achieves in a romantic tale about herself and a farmer, named Jack. Maura, a native of Portstewart in Co. Derry, was educated…
Saint Patrick: An Ancient Saint for Modern Times by Edmond Grace SJ (Sacred Heart Messenger, €4.95) At this time of the year we Irish tend to think of St Patrick as ‘our saint’, but Edmund Grace begins his brief book with a very insightful encounter far from Ireland. In St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York he…
Cold Pursuit (16) Why would one of the most beloved actors of our country, someone who received a tsunami of reverence for the dignified manner in which he dealt with the freakish death of his wife Natasha some years ago, commit career suicide through a racist rant? Unless you’ve been living under a stone in recent…
St John Paul II’s Theology of the Body isn’t just about sex. That might seem unlikely to those who’ve only ever encountered specific introductions to the late Pope’s biggest area of catechesis, or who’ve only ever heard caricatures of the late Pope’s teaching, but it’s important to understand for all that. Emily Stimpson at thecatholictable.com…
Nathaniel Hone: Travels of a Landscape Artist National Gallery of Ireland 23 February–1 December 2019 After Nathaniel Hone the younger died in 1917 his wife donated to the National Gallery some 500 works of art: it took until the 1950s to catalogue them all. Most of us have an image of Hone as the creator…
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan
Aubrey Malone
Greg Daly