For many people Viking Dublin and Protestant Georgian Dublin, thanks largely to the fierce controversies over the years about their preservation, are more familiar than the long intervening centuries of medieval Dublin, when the capital might be said to have been a truly Catholic though English speaking city. This book is a notable attempt to bridge…

Whenever the question of married priests, women in the Church or even women priests comes up, I often think of the wife of a Church of Ireland bishop, who remarked to me: “I often wonder about the enthusiasm of some Catholics for women in the Church. It’s not much fun being married to a priest.”…

Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923

The Irish Citizen Army by Ann Matthews (Mercier Press, €14.99/£11.99)

Pope Francis: Thoughts and Words for the Soul by Jorge Mario Bergoglio ed. by Giuseppe Costa (White Star Publishers, €12.28/£11.50)

John F Deane This book by the Berryman scholar, Philip Coleman, is beautifully timed, both as a celebration of Berryman’s birth 100 years ago, and in its work to challenge assumptions about the poetry that have tended to diminish Berryman’s worth. Assessment of a poet may change from generation to generation. So-called ‘confessional’ poets have…

His encounters with Christianity is one of the mysteries of Marco Polo