Category Archives: Book Reviews
Ferulas & Thuribles
My review of John Mulholland’s book ‘Ferulas & Thuribles.’ A worthwhile Stonyhurst memoir Memory may fail us, not least as we enter our twilight years, but as luminaries such as Marcel Proust and T.S Eliot recognised, we carry within us our past, and parts of it can resurface unconsciously, and take shape if mind and body allow us that extra mile in which to reflect and discern. As Eliot wrote in Little Gidding, this use of memory is for liberation-‘not least of love but expanding of love beyond desire , …
John le Carré & Graham Greene
Review of Adam Sisman’s Biography of John le Carré pubilshed in The Tablet 17 December 2015 As admirers of Graham Greene will know, espionage can provide the context for exceptional novels. Few living writers have learned that lesson as well as David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré. Le Carré, like Greene, drew from his own experience in the intelligence servies to produce some of his best work: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, relatively early on in his writing career, and …
John Cavadini review of Pope of Good Promise in The Tablet
Francis: Pope of good promise 15 October 2015 by Jimmy Burns, reviewed by John Cavadini In his lively, sometimes compelling biography, Jimmy Burns sets out to offer his reader “fresh insight into a key spiritual figure of our times”, cautioning the reader that, nevertheless, this is “not a hagiography”. It is not, he assures us, the story of a “picture-book saint”, but of a “complex man” with a “mixed record”. For example, the book’s most searching chapter, “The Dirty War”, sifts through the evidence for the Jesuit provincial Jorge Bergoglio’s …
Catholic Herald Book Review
Book review: From ‘little devil’ to rescuer of fallen women by Jane Taylor posted Thursday, 8 Oct 2015 The future Pope Francis greets the faithful in Buenos Aires in 2009 (AP) This latecomer on the Pope Francis biography scene is fresh, vivid and beautifully crafted Francis: Pope of Good Promise by Jimmy Burns, Constable, £25 With so much now on record about Pope Francis and at least three weighty biographies by well-known Catholic writers published during the past two years, the question has to be: what’s new here? Jimmy Burns …
Life with Captain Bob
MAXWELL’S FALL By Roy Greenslade Simon & Schuster Pounds 4.99 Among the least edifying spectacles of the aftermath of Mr Robert Maxwell’s death was the speed of the overnight conversion of his flagship newspaper, the Daily Mirror, from docile servant to exposer of the publisher’s many sins. The newspaper that had proclaimed Mr Maxwell a ‘giant with wisdom’ was to go out of its way to condemn him as a devil. The Mirror’s exposes ranged from stories of widespread buggings of senior executives to mock-up photographs of Mr Maxwell with …
