Caricature and the Irish: Satirical prints from the Library of Trinity College Dublin, c.1780 –1830, by Nicholas K. Robinson (Four Courts Press, €40.00 / £35.00) Felix M. Larkin E.B. White, the noted children’s author, for decades a literary stalwart of the New Yorker, that great home for cartoonists of all kinds over the last…
A recent event at the National Concert Hall commemorated the centenary of the death in 1924 of Giacomo Puccini through his Messa di Gloria. An early work, the piece still has considerable merit to its credit. However, I felt the respectable performance under visiting conductor Carlo Rizzi with tenor and bass soloists – Gwyn Hughes…
Living the Camino Back Home, by Brendan McManus SJ and Katherine O’Flynn FCJ (Messenger Publications, €9.95 / £8.95) Here is a book which can be seriously said to fill a pressing need. Books about the Camino and the experiences of those walking it, for their various reasons – which are not always quite as “religious”…
It’s a trend these days for people to loathe their past – especially the past history and culture of their country. There are lots of serious faults with our past in Ireland, but when the past becomes the all-consuming bogeyman, present abuses slip under the radar. Present and ongoing abuses are the ones we can…
The formal reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, now fully restored after the disastrous fire on April 15 2019, will take place a month from now, on December 8. It will be an occasion with important lessons for all the world to learn from, but also one surrounded by controversy. With this important event…
Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals, by Maurice J. Casey (Footnote Press, £20.00 / €24.00) The Communist International, which became widely known as Comintern, was founded in Moscow 1919. In the tangled politics of the left since 1848 there had been two other international movements, which had failed; but this new organisation…
We are all aware of the great importance of ancient Irish manuscripts to our knowledge of the past and the history of the peoples that have lived in Ireland. But the prominence of the Book of Kells has distorted this tradition. The Book of Kells is a liturgical set of the gospels, but the text is unimportant compared with…
The Church comes in for a roasting in Small Things Like These (12A), a film based on Clare Keegan’s novel of the same name dedicated to the “56,000” girls sent to Magdalene laundries for “penance and rehabilitation.” Trailing clouds of glory from his Oscar turn in Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy gives a sensitive performance as taciturn…
A History of Irish Magic, by Sally North and James North (Holythorn Press, limited hardbound edition € 60.00; paperback edition, €30.) When the remains of the poet W. B. Yeats were brought back to Ireland in September 1948, they were interred as he had intended in Drumcliffe Churchyard in Sligo, according to the ritual…
Is a crime motivated by hate worse than one motivated by greed, or anger, or lust or indeed any one of the other deadly sins? What if motives are mixed, as they often are? Should the law treat a perpetrator more harshly depending on the motivation? I’m not convinced. Such questions became very pertinent last…
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan
Aubrey Malone