Dante’s Divine Comedy: A biography Joseph Luzzi Princeton University Press, £20.00 / €24.00 Author Joseph Luzzi, who gained his doctorate at Yale University, is the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College, a private arts college in the Hudson River Valley, New York, where he also teaches Italian Studies and film. His new…
Being July, the silly season, there are many blockbusters as well as sequels and remakes on our screens now. With the children being off school there’s much fare to suit them too, animated features like Smurfs, The Bad Guys 2 and The Girl Who Leapt Through Fire. Scarlet Johansson is the draw for Jurassic World:…
Nationwide (RTÉ One, Saturday) featured a special programme on St Oliver Plunkett to mark the 400th anniversary of his birth. Presented by Colm Flynn, it was a concise but comprehensive overview of his life and death. We heard from Fr Mark Mohan, Parish Priest of Oldcastle Co. Meath, home of the Plunkett family – a…
Last week I wrote about Will Hays, Fr Daniel Lord and the formation of the Production Code Administration (PCA). This prohibited the release of films deemed anathema to a Catholic ethos in early Hollywood. I mentioned the Roscoe Arbuckle scandal. Some years before, there was the drug death of Wallace Reid and the murder of…
The Uses of Idolatry William T. Cavanaugh Oxford University Press, £97.00 / €113.59 This book is important and difficult. Important because it orientates us in a changing political landscape, difficult because it does so in a discussion of a complicated topic, “idolatry”, drawing on profound thinkers, St Augustine and Jean-Luc Marion, in particular. I…
Finding Mangan: The Lives and Afterlives of Ireland’s National Poet Bridget Hourican Gill Books, €22.99 / £17.50 James Clarence Mangan was not always destined to be Ireland’s ‘national poet’. That place at that time in the 1830s had been long and largely filled by Thomas Moore. Today Moore has a large and challenging statue…
Last week I wrote about Cecil B. De Mille vis-a-vis Catholic ideology in his films. One of the scenes in his 1932 feature The Sign of the Cross contained an erotic dance. Catholic audiences were outraged, so much so that Presbyterian deacon Will H. Hays, who’d been employed by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors…
Joe Duffy’s departure from Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1) last Friday was the end of a media era. Some will be sad, some will be happy. The final episode with Joe at the helm was rightly a cheerful and celebratory affair and the essence of it was well captured on Playback (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday). Joe…
The Papers of Maurice FitzGerald, 18th Knight of Kerry: Volume 1: Disillusioned Unionist; Vol. 11: Rejected Emancipationist, edited by Adrian FitzGerald (Kingdom Books, €50.00 / £43.00) By Thomas McCarthy The life and public career of the 18th Knight of Kerry, Maurice FitzGerald, spanned the most turbulent last years of the Irish Parliament, the passing of the Act of…
Gaelic and Free: Memoirs of Pádraig O’Callaghan, edited by Elizabeth Scanlan & Brendan O’Callaghan (Lettertec Publishing, €20.00 / £17. 20 plus p+p; Lettertec, Carrigtwohill, Co. Cork T45 NX81; infor@lettertect.com) J. Anthony Gaughan Two issues dominated the life of Pádraig O’Callaghan: teaching and promoting the Irish language and striving for “an Ireland, Gaelic and Free”. O’Callaghan was…
Aubrey Malone
Brendan O’Regan
Peter Costello