There is still time to catch the annual showing of the Henry Vaughan Bequest of Turner watercolours at the National Gallery of Ireland before it closes at the end of the month. It is in the Print Gallery, reached from Clare Street, and is free with no booking needed. The Henry Vaughan Bequest is a…
Becoming Human, Becoming Divine: The Christian Life According to Blessed Columba Marmion, by Columba McCann OSB (Veritas, €9.99/£8.50 – prices subject to change) This year marks the centenary of the death of Blessed Columba Marmion in 1923. This is an anniversary which will be of great interest to many across Ireland, given his Dublin birth…
Lead Kindly Light: Essays for Ian Kerr, Ed. Paul Shrimpton, (Gracewing £20.00/€22.75) This book is a festschrift to mark, the editor says, the fourscore years of the life of Ian Kerr, the Newman scholar. He succeeded to the eminence of the late Fr Charles Dessain who sustained over so many years the great project to…
While the National Symphony Orchestra saluted 2023 at the National Concert Hall (NCH) with a programme of Viennese and other bon bons on New Year’s Day, it later returned to its 2022/23 Subscription Series with Mozart’s Flute and Harp Concerto and Stravinsky’s Pulcinella ballet. The latter dates from 1919 around the start of what is…
One of my favourite Christmas albums is Phil Cunningham’s Christmas Songbook and one of my favourite TV shows is the Transatlantic Sessions, so I was in my element last Friday night on BBC Four. It was the start of Wayfaring Stranger with Phil Cunningham, a three part series on the links between the folk music…
The Art of Disagreeing Well: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard, by Bo Seo (William Collins, £14.99/€16.99) Bo Seo, the author of this very interesting book, is of Korean background but was raised in Australia. He made his name as a school and college debater, and went on to build on this…
The Most Estimable of Men: Judge John O’Hagan, Patriot, Poet, Scholar, Lawyer by Thomas J. Morrissey SJ (Messenger Publications, €19.95/£18.95) Having heard so much recently about patriots of later generations, it is very welcome to have a biography of a man of the Young Ireland movement – a book which will remind some and inform…
The Falling Dusk: The 2023 Lent Book, by Paul Dominiak (Bloomsbury, £12.99/€14.50) With Easter eggs, as noted above, already appearing in some shops (or so it is reported), it is certainly a good idea to give some prior thought to the season of Lent and the celebration of Easter. This book is not one of those…
This year the celebration of the Feast of the Nativity, according to the ancient Julian Calendar by the Egyptian Copts, took place last week with great ceremony. It brought into focus the cultural changes moving over contemporary Egypt where the Copts – who are miaphysites of ancient standing – now in accord with most other…
The word ‘unprecedented’ has had many outings in the last three years, and media commentators reached for it again in relation to the funeral of Pope Benedict XVI. Benedict was already a master of the unprecedented thanks to his surprise resignation in 2013. Some early coverage of his death was inclined to be lazy, clichéd…
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan