The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation edited by Peter Marshall (Oxford University Press, £18.99pb RPP) Peter Marshall, the editor of this book, is professor of history at Warwick and on the board of the journal British Catholic History. With six colleagues he provides an approachable résumé, very well illustrated with vivid and relevant images,…
“Romantic England’s dead and gone,” says Steven Patrick Morrissey, deliberately misquoting Yeats in this engrossing biopic, “it’s with Jane Austen in the grave”. Elsewhere his mother makes a wallpaper joke about his hero Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s reputed last words, remember, were: “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.” These are just two of the (unexplained)…
What I like about Sunday Sequence (BBC Radio Ulster) is the wide variety of topics and contributors. Last Sunday’s edition had several worthwhile topics covered even in the first half hour. There was an analysis of the current political troubles in resource-rich Venezuela, outlining the Church’s mediation attempts and its difficulty in avoiding manipulation by…
One of the strangest sights in social media in recent times has seen Cambridge classicist Prof. Mary Beard being mocked by the US-based essayist and risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb over her supposed inability to handle evidence relating to the ethnic diversity of Roman Britain. The minutiae of the argument go a bit beyond this…
Ireland’s nuns have not been getting much respect of late, for reason that painful headlines make only too clear. But in all this controversy some things are lost sight of. Critics seem to think that the Church took over institutions that ought to have been run by the state; but the truth is that if…
Joe Carroll When World War II broke out in September 1939, it left many hundreds, possibly more than a thousand Irish men and women living in France with a dilemma; whether to seek refuge in neutral Éire or hold on to see what would happen. For those who were still there following the fall of…
Terrorism has horrific consequences. Among these consequences, and frequently not adverted to, are lack of respect for the truth, the undermining of the rule of law and the obstruction of justice. In this remarkable study the author, who has specialised in criminal law in England, Wales and Ireland since 1966, details how consequences such as…
When someone in a film says, “it’s going to be the best time ever!” you know they’re in for a nightmare – even (especially?) if they’re in an idyllic Mexican holiday resort where all the beautiful people cavort. The ‘wine doubling as blood’ prologue in a swimming pool sets us up for a Jaws-like scare-athon.…
It wasn’t as momentous as some made out but the departure of the host from Tonight With Vincent Browne (TV3) after ten years is certainly worth marking. His period on the show has been marked by outrage at social injustice, incisive political analysis, savaging of politicians, affirming of journalists (except from the Irish Independent), relatively…
Our economies may be in recovery, but they are far from healthy, warns Bill Emmott, who writes with the authority and assurance of a former editor-in-chief of The Economist. He believes that the most insidious of the ‘enemies that lie within’ is the swollen, still largely unregulated financial services sector, that was responsible for the…
Aubrey Malone
Brendan O’Regan
Greg Daly
Peter Costello