Love’s Doorway to Life: An Alternative Biography of Patrick Kavanagh boxed set of three discs, scripted and narrated by Úna Agnew and Art Agnew (Éist Audio Productions; www.eist.ie, €25.00) These days, with perhaps fewer young people reading books, this three-disc set may well be the ideal modern way of presenting a great poet. The creators are…
Journey’s End (12A) They wait. They joke about soup. They snap off one another. Days pass. The spring offensive looms… We’re in France in March 1918, the last year of World War I. The ‘Boche’ still has some fight left in him and is about to descend on a group of British soldiers in a trench…
The World of Books – By the books editor For a man holding what many still see as the most powerful position in the world, President Trump has an uncanny instinct to express in the brutal language of the bar and locker-room the opinions of some of the most uninformed people in the United…
Last Saturday was Holocaust Memorial Day and also the day An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar declared (on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, curiously) that he would campaign to liberalise Ireland’s abortion laws. To mark the former, Nationwide (RTÉ 1) last Friday evening broadcast a moving programme featuring the Island of Ireland Peace Choir on a visit…
Picturing the Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation in the Arts over Two Millennia by Natasha O’Hear & Anthony O’Hear (Oxford University Press, £12.99) The other week a false alarm over an incoming ballistic missile (presumably from North Korea and armed with a nuclear warhead) scared the inhabitants of Hawaii witless. Fleeing the beach in minutes, they…
Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem by Tim Shipman (William Collins, £25) Peter Hegarty This year will test Theresa May. She must somehow get a good deal for Britain, the weaker negotiating partner, in talks with an increasingly assertive EU. In an impeccably-sourced account of her premiership Tim Shipman, the political editor of the Sunday…
Artists: Their Lives and Works foreword by Ross King (Dorling Kindersley £25.00) Michael Collins We admire the work of artists and are in awe of their magnificent creations. Their deftness with pencil, charcoal and paintbrush capture a moment and turn it into a timeless masterpiece. In this book the editors have produced an elegant volume which…
“In a remarkable move,” tweeted Chicago-based campus minister @richraho, “+Anthony Taylor boycotts local March for Life because keynote speaker, the State’s AG, is pro-death penalty.” A link to an article from arkansas-catholic.org detailed how Little Rock’s Bishop encouraged Catholics to join him in one of two pro-life Masses he would celebrate on Sunday January 21,…
Imagining Alternative Irelands in 1912: Cultural Discourse in the Periodical Press Brian Ward (Four Courts Press, €50) Felix M. Larkin Historians should always be conscious of the importance of contingency in shaping events. As the distinguished American historian David McCullough, biographer of John Adams and Harry Truman, says: “Nothing ever had to happen the way it happened.…
I spent more hours than was healthy watching Oireachtas TV coverage of the Dáil debates on the Report of the Committee on the Eighth Amendment. It was not encouraging. First off the overwhelming majority of contributors were strongly pro-choice and seemed completely oblivious to the existence of a baby in a pregnancy situation. Clare Daly TD…
Aubrey Malone
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan
Greg Daly