Chronicling the Papacy
Noted historian Dr P G Maxwell-Stuart considers the Papacy from
St. Peter to the present day. Rí-rá looks at this comprehensive
work and also reviews the best of the rest.
 Described
as a highly-readable popular history and a unique work of reference, Chronicle
of the Popes includes biographical accounts of all the 266 Popes.
It covers everyone from St. Peter to Benedict XVI, giving a history
of these fascinating individuals — from saintly pastors to great
statesmen and patrons of the arts.
There is full coverage of the Crusader, Avignon and Borgia Popes as well
as the 39 antipopes — rival Popes.
It also includes timelines throughout with at-a-glance visual guides to
the length and important events of each Pope’s reign.
You can find datafiles for every Pope listing key information, such as
name at birth, early career and family relationships and there are extensive
quotations from contemporary sources that enrich the narrative.
Numerous sidebars and special features are included in the book, ranging
from the excavation of St. Peter’s tomb to the Catholic rejuvenation
of the Counter-Reformation and there are over 300 illustrations including
portraits and busts of the Popes and art treasures from the Vatican.
Dr P G Maxwell-Stuart is a Lecturer in the Department of Modern History
at the University of St. Andrews and an honorary Fellow of the Institute
of Reformation Studies there. His research interests range from the Classical
period to the Renaissance, and he is the author of numerous books as well
as articles for scholarly journals.
Chronicle Of The Popes by P.G. Maxwell-Stuart is published by Thames
& Hudson.
Joachim Fischer & Grace Neville
As Others Saw Us
Cork was described in 1757 as a ‘pretty fortified town’,
and its residents were seen as ‘characters’ in 1801, noted
for their penchant for ‘bragging’ and ‘exaggeration’.
The smell of beer which ‘floated up to my house from the Beamish
Brewery’ is a common memory, as are recollections of the butter
and meat trade, involving the slaughter of cattle, its carving into cuts
and salting for export as far away as India.
The beauty of the harbour and Lee estuary have long-standing appeal, and
it is the ‘only harbour in the world that the Titanic deemed worthy
of a stopover’.
This city, which has ‘confounded all its would-be conquerors’,
is a ‘hilly city and a cultural centre’ famous for its ‘slopes
and steps, church towers and bridges’, for its slang and distinctive
‘seesaw’ accent, with ‘guttural sounds, and incredibly
fast phrasing’. Described in 1889 as a city ‘devoid of character’
it is generally considered a ‘unique urban reality’ and a
‘magnificent vista’.
This anthology by continental writers about Cork from medieval times to
the present day includes excerpts from travel books, essays, newspaper
articles and memoirs. There are accounts for visits by French, German,
Czech, Polish, Danish, Italian, Dutch, Austrian, Spanish, Galician, Hungarian,
Romanian and Scandinavian visitors. The city of Cork is put into a truly
European perspective.
Included are excerpts from travel books, essays, newspaper articles and
memoirs.
Apart from Cork City the book also features the immediate vicinity including
Blarney, Cobh and Cork harbour.
Debby Holt
The Ex-Wife’s Survival Guide
Sarah Stagg thought she had it all: A lovely husband, twin teenage sons,
a cottage in the country. Then her husband, a keen amateur thespian, leaves
her for his leading lady, her sons go off to India and for the first time
in 20 years Sarah is very alone and very single.
Happily married for the past 20 years, Sarah has no idea how to fill her
empty house, her empty days nor to play the role of discarded wife.
As Sarah is to discover the way forward is strewn with hazards and humiliations.
If she is not to be bludgeoned to pieces, she must acquire skills for
survival... fast.
Help — and hindrance — is at hand in the form of well-meaning
neighbours, a psychopathic mongrel, an unassuming plumber and an unwelcome
role as Mrs De Winter in the forthcoming Ambercross Players’ production
of Rebecca.
Warm, witty and utterly beguiling this sharply observed comedy of —
anything but — peaceful village life will appeal to anyone who has
lost the love of their life and had to start over again.
As a keen amateur dramatist no one is better qualified than Debby Holt
to expose the curious world of the village dramatic society.
This utterly beguiling and sharply-observed comedy of manners provides
an addictive peek into Middle England village life complete with nosy
neighbours, inept vicars, disastrous dinner parties and a mustard-keen
Amateur Dramatics Club.
In this wickedly funny and hugely entertaining comedy of manners, life
in a small Wiltshire village is exposed with a highly infectious sense
of humour and a devastatingly accurate eye for detail.
Holt divides her time between writing and supply teaching. She regularly
contributes short stories to numerous papers and magazines.
Caitriona O’Reilly
The Sea Cabinet
Caitriona O’Reilly’s poetry is remarkable for its precise
observation of the natural world.
Her second collection The Sea Cabinet broadens that clear-sighted vision
in poems also haunted by history consolidating the achievement of her
prizewinning debut volume The Nowhere Birds.
Her title-poem conjures the vanished world of the whaling industry and
serves as a starting-pint for other acute meditations on natural and cultural
obsolescence.
Yet the habitual concerns of the lyric self are present too in poems which
enact the dilemmas and anxieties of the individual amidst a rapidly changing
environment.
Caitriona O’Reilly’s first collection, The Nowhere Birds
won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature given for the best book by any
new Irish writer published in 2001.And she’s received high praise.
Her work has been described as: “The most startlingly accomplished
debut collection by any Irish poet since Paul Muldoon’s New Weather
in 1973.”
John Creed
Black Cat Black Dog
When a set of dogtags supposedly belonging to a seaman missing since
the early 1950s is washed up on a beach in modern day Co. Antrim Jack
Valentine, “deadbeat ex-spook”, finds himself being pulled
back towards his previous life once more.
But what can the disturbance of an old North Sea arms dump dating back
to the end of the Second World War have to do with a botched US mission
to Iraq in the early 1990s?
And why are faces Jack knows all too well suddenly appearing in the wintry
landscape of Northern Ireland.
Including many familiar characters from the previous two novels —
The Sirius Crossing and The Day Of The Dead — Black Cat Black Dog
is the most exciting and gripping yet of the Jack Valentine thrillers.
From Ireland to Iraq, the MOD to the MRU and enough double crossing,
violence and intrigue to satisfy all seasoned thriller readers.
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