Naomi Watts is one of my favourite actresses, and her performance here as Princess Diana has its moments, but it has to be said that she doesn’t look that much like her. Maybe we’ve been spoiled in this department by the fact that Helen Mirren was a dead ringer for Queen Elizabeth in The Queen and Meryl…
Category: Reviews
At the heart of the Eucharist
It has been quite clear in recent years that some Catholics hold what would have once been considered heterodox beliefs about the Eucharist. This was, for many traditional minded people, demonstrated by Mary McAleese taking the sacrament in St Patrick’s Cathedral. It is significant then that this book is subtitled “an aid to Christian unity” — such…
The Sporting Monarch of the Kingdom
J. Anthony Gaughan This is a remarkable book about a remarkable Kerryman. Dick Fitzgerald was born in Killarney on October 2, 1882. He was educated by the Presentation Brothers at their school in Killarney and their commercial college in Cork. Thereafter he was engaged in his parents’ export business. A keen footballer from his earliest years, for over…
Maeve Binchy: The Biography
Maeve Binchy, who died a year ago, will still be much missed by her countless readers. It seems very soon for any really full and deep searching account of her life to appear. Certainly this is not it. Indeed Piers Dudgeonís book reads more like a fanís notebook than a true biography. He has been…
History Year by Year
It is a common complaint that children here and in England, where this book originates, have very confused ideas of history. This profusely illustrated large format book will go some way to remedying that. With a significant input from the Smithsonian in Washington DC, it begins some six and half millenniums ago and comes right…
The Illustrated Story of Art
Though the text is compact, the range of art over time which some five scholars have put together gives a revealing appreciation of what art has been since earliest times, enhanced by many fine and often unusual illustrations. As a basic text, it covers a great deal, though one has qualms that fully a quarter of…
The World of Books
Peter CostelloMark Patrick Hederman, OSB has already given a wide ranging appreciation in this newspaper of some of the special qualities that characterised the late poet Seamus Heaney, whose passing has been greatly mourned. But there are other things too that might be said about Heaney from the point of view of the literary historian. …
More insights into Africa’s mission era
In this book Fr Hogan, now living in Cork after a life spent on the missions in Africa, continues his interesting investigations of the social, political and religious interactions in the early years of colonial Nigeria. The Ebira of his study maynot be so familiar a name as the Ibo or Yoruba are to many…
Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women
The prime mover in Kate Cooper’s learned, engaged history is Saint Paul, the peripatetic tent-maker who was the most influential of all Christian missionaries. He and his early converts proclaimed the new faith in the seaports of the Eastern Mediterranean. These first converts, who themselves would become agents of conversion, tended to be well-born, propertied…
At Home in My Body, CD1: Reconnecting
A sign of the changing times: this is a CD by a Connemara based priest, influenced perhaps by Eastern ideas, which allows listeners to become at home in themselves, and in doing so open up their spirit to wider influences. His insights are intended for both individuals and for prayer groups. There has been a long…