Nick Ripatrazone looks at Letters Around a Garden by Rainer Maria Rilke, written to his close friend Antoinette, a gardener, a century ago. ‘ Aside from a few tulips, my little garden has not yet recited its Easter prayer,” wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke on Good Friday, 1924. His recipient was Antoinette de Bonstetten, a horticulture student at the University of Lausanne, whose skill might be useful to Rilke’s vision for the grounds of Château de Muzot, where the poet was halfway through a residency that would produce ambitious poems – yet leave the poet plagued with illness. It was a bitte ..read more

The English College at Lisbon 1622-1972, by Simon Johnson Gracewing, £25, 272 pages The relationship between Britain and Portugal is often claimed to be the longest-lasting diplomatic alliance in the world. From the Treaty of Windsor in 1386 onwards, the two countries have been close allies. John I married Philippa of Lancaster; their son Henry the Navigator gave Portugal the impetus for its global exploration. Britain got a perpetual ally against Spain, Bombay (hence India), and an alternative supply during the frequent interruptions of French wine imports. Who gave to whom small custard tart ..read more

Liberty over London Bridge: A History of the People of Southwark by Margaret Willes Yale University Press, £20, 304 pages The dead are interesting, even fascinating, but never nearly so much as the living. Long strangled by a stultifying confederacy of German bombs, English planners and international finance, the City of London is dead. Across London Bridge, however, is a place very much alive: the Borough of Southwark. Its people are the subject of an admirable centuries-spanning chronicle by Margaret Willes, previously known for her well-received history of the Square Mile relayed ..read more

Alexandria: The City that Changed the World Islam Issa Sceptre, £30, 496 pages In 331 BC, on the north coast of Egypt, an extraordinarily talented and hubristic young man ordered the construction of a new city. The location was well chosen: between the open sea of the Mediterranean and the freshwater lake Mereotis; a coastal island providing shelter for a future harbour; close to the fertile Nile Delta, but a sufficient distance to avoid its regular flooding. The location was also mythical, associated with a legendary visit by Helen of Troy. No doubt this was appreciated by the Greek colonists ..read more

Cloistered Catherine Coldstream Chatto & Windus, £20, 352 pages Charlotte Brontë’s classic bildungs-roman, Jane Eyre, tells the story of a young girl moving from a cruel adolescence to a cruel adulthood before finally settling into marriage with the man she had once rejected because God and her conscience had called her away. For years, Jane grieves deeply. Whilst reading Catherine Coldstream’s contemplative memoir, Cloistered, I often found myself recalling the spiritual structure of Bronte’s novel as a way of understanding why it is a woman in her late 20s might commit 12 years of her li ..read more

Just over three years ago I wrote a piece for the Herald called “The Battle of the Papal Biographers” (March 2021). In it I noted that since 2013 there had been at least eight books written about Pope Francis in English, with others on the way. About one a year seems a pretty impressive run rate. Many authors have been complimentary about Pope Francis and his priorities; Christopher Lamb, Austen Ivereigh, Paul Vallely, Jimmy Burns and John Cornwell among them. Others have taken a more critical view; Henry Sire’s The Dictator Pope of 2017 is a significant outlier which, although anomalous, dese ..read more

“The question about our world is not really why so much violence, but why so little? Why are we not always at each other’s throats?” In 1997, the philosopher René Girard asked provocative questions in his compelling D’Arcy Lecture. Delivered annually at Campion Hall, Oxford since 1976, the lectures are in honour of Martin D’Arcy, SJ, the British philosopher who is perhaps the only Jesuit to have been published by TS Eliot (The Mind and the Heart of Love, 1945). D’Arcy’s literary and artistic interests have been well-represented by his titular lecturers, among them Girard (one of the only non-J ..read more

The Illuminated Window: Stories across Time Virginia Chieffo Raguin Reaktion Books, £30, 272 pages Writing in the first half of the 12th century, the monk and craftsman known as Theophilus Presbyter – in his three volume treatise on devotional art, De Diversis Artibus – lifted the lid on the ecclesiastical furnishings of his own day, their creation, function and use. His first and third books are devoted to painting and metalwork respectively, while the second concentrates on the use of stained glass, with its potential for what he calls works of “inestimable beauty”. A skill that went back to ..read more

Crypt: Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond Alice Roberts Simon & Schuster, £22, 352 pages Alice Roberts’s new book is the f nal instalment of a trilogy, which looks at death and burial using a “synthesis of history, archaeology and genetics”. In Crypt, unlike in her other books, Professor Roberts incorporates the study of disease. The result is a fine-grained yet elusive insight into moments in time. As Roberts explains in the epilogue, “archaeology is not the handmaiden of history”. Bone and biomolecules provide information about the past that is relatively free from the ..read more

On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain by Oliver Smith Bloomsbury Continuum, £20, 256 pages A book about pilgrimage should make me a pushover as a reader. I love reading about pilgrimage, especially when imprisoned in the Catholic Herald basement office, forced to realise my pilgrimage dreams vicariously through books such On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain, in which Oliver Smith retraces old pilgrimage routes and visits sacred sites all over the UK. Unfortunately, we did not get off to a good start. Admittedly, the problem wasn’t really Smith’s fault. It ..read more