Christy (15A) is an unflinching portrait of a 17-year-old reject from the foster care system struggling to get some stability into his life in a working-class district of North Cork. It oozes authenticity from every pore. You won’t catch anyone acting here. Christy (Daniel Power) is staying with his estranged half brother Shane (Diarmuid Noyes),…
Notre-Dame de Paris, by Victor Hugo, newly translated from the French with an introduction by John Sturrock (Penguin Classics, €13.99) After its formal reopening at the end of last year, Notre Dame cathedral in Paris this summer returned, after those dark years of closure, to its place as the most popular tourist attraction in…
No One Was Paying Any Attention to the Sky: Flannery O’Connor and Modernity, by Damian Ference (Wiseblood books, US$11.00 / €9.50) Flannery O’Connor was a remarkable writer, who was born and passed her short life in the state of Georgia, a region beset by its “Southern Gothic” heritage, a history of slavery and passionate division,…
Drawn not Driven: Pilgrim of Life’s Beckonings, by Warren Ford (Red Feather Publishing, 2025). This is a fascinating autobiography, a wide ranging account of an Australian . The author, Warren Ford, was born in Western Australia on 23 January 1942. He attended the elementary convent school of St Aloysius conducted by the Mercy Sisters…
Driven by the Monsoons: Through the Indian Ocean and the Seas of China, by Barry Cunliffe (Oxford University Press, £30.00 / € 42.00) Barry Cunliffe, now Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at Oxford University, is one of the most distinguished archaeologists of his generation. He is known not just as an excavator, but also as…
The sexual assault at the centre of Sorry, Baby (15A) is transmitted to us effectively. We see the outside of a house with steps leading up to it in late evening. The bottom floor is lit. We then segue to the house sometime later. The same lights are on but evening has now turned into…
Christopher Hill: The life of a radical historian, by Michael Braddick (London: Verso Press, £35.00 / €42.95) Though I occasionally met Christopher Hill (1912 -2002), he was, as the author of this thoughtful study attests, as reserved within his kindly and courteous public demeanour as to have left me with little sense of his actual…
Is Ireland a racist country? Based on my experience it is not, but no doubt there are racists among us. Recently The Irish Catholic had a headline about Indian Catholics being the target of abuse, which led to a wider discussion. On Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) Archbishop of Dublin, Dermot Farrell, spoke of…
If you need cheering up after watching the News I have some good stuff for you this week. A story of faith featured on the first episode of The Hills Are Alive – A Year at Kylemore Abbey (RTÉ One, Sunday). It was such an enjoyable programme, cheerful, prayerful and even playful. A lot of…
As I indicated last week, producers started taking liberties with the Legion of Decency and the Production Code in the fifties. In 1951 Roberto Rossellini directed The Miracle, a film in which the character of Mary Magdalene is aligned with the Virgin Mary. The Vatican condemned it for profanity. So did the Legion. Cardinal Spellman,…
Aubrey Malone
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan