Curious Creatures: Frans Post & Brazil exhibition curated by Niamh MacNally, National Gallery of Ireland, continues to December 9, 2018 Curious Creatures: Frans Post & Brazil catalogue edited by Niamh MacNally (NGI, €9.95) Frans Post: Animals in Brazil by Alexander de Bruin (Riks Museum, Amsterdam, €19.95) When Europeans first intruded into South America their view…
Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward (Simon and Schuster, €19.99) Peter Hegarty Fear, the revealing account of Trump’s time in the White House to date, Woodward’s 19th book since All the President’s Men, describes an “emotionally overwrought, mercurial, and unpredictable leader” and his chaotic administration, in which Woodward has excellent contacts. His book rests firmly…
The Parnell Split in Westmeath: the bishop and the newspaper editor by Michael Nolan (Four Courts Press, €9.95) Felix M. Larkin John Patrick Hayden established the Westmeath Examiner in Mullingar in 1882, and was its editor and proprietor for a record 72 years – until his death in 1954, aged 91. His father, and later his brother, owned the Roscommon Messenger,…
It can be hard these days to find a TV drama that’s not marred by gratuitous crude language and worse, so I took notice of pre-publicity for a new show whose creator was reported as saying “the show I want to produce is playful, family friendly and a celebration of old-fashioned puzzle solving”. So said…
Pat O’Kelly Although it officially opens tomorrow evening, Friday, September 28, the 2018 New Ross Piano Festival is already under way. It began yesterday, Wednesday, September 26, with its Young Pianists’ Concert when a fledgling group, ranging in age from seven to 17, tried out the Steinway grand at the festival’s base – the…
Kindling the Flame: 150 years of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation by Niamh Puirséil (Gill, €24.99) Daire Keogh Media reports of the planned retirement of Sheila Nunan as general secretary of the Irish National Teachers Organisation have naturally focussed both on her personal achievement, as first female leader of her union, and the enduring influence…
Defending Hope: Dispatches from the Front Lines in Palestine and Israel by Eoin Murray and James Mehigan (Veritas, €16.99) Geoff Day ‘Hope is not the solution, nor the end goal: it is just the beginning’ writes Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Maguire in her introduction to this important book of essays from those at the front…
Corruptio optimi pessima goes the old saying – the corruption of the best is the worst, and one of the most dispiriting things about the internal quarrels that have increasingly marked the English-speaking Catholic internet over the last few years is that commentators, publications, and websites that once were measured and thoughtful have become less…
Black 47 (15A) Rambo meets Fionn Mac Cumhaill in this mesmerising drama from Lance Daly. I don’t think we’ve ever had a Celtic action hero before unless we count Braveheart. There’s an almost super-human one in this highly unusual film. It starts out as a kind of post-colonial history lesson about the horrors of the famine…
Chalk Dust by Noel Monahan (Salmon Poetry, €14.00) Seamus Cashman In my first reading of this collection of some 56 poems (150 pages long!) by the Longford poet, dramatist, and former teacher, I found several poems taking me into imagination, back my own era of ‘chalk dust’. The first poem, ‘Still-Life Study’, a poem based on…
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan
Greg Daly
Aubrey Malone