The Latin Mass and the Intellectuals: Petitions to Save the ancient Mass from 1966 to 2007 Dr Joseph Shaw, president of the Latin Mass Society, launched his third book to an eclectic crowd of traditional priests and laypeople at the Brompton Oratory last week. The Latin Mass and the Intellectuals: Petitions to Save the Ancient Mass from 1966 to 2007, edited by Dr Shaw, contains contributions from multiple authors, ranging from bi-ritual liturgically-minded priests to professorial academics and musicians.  The book, in many ways, does what it says on the tin. As can be expected, its s ..read more

Nick Ripatrazone appreciates a new God-filled collection of poetry by a writer who is both catholic and Catholic. I first encountered a poem from Butterfly Nebula, the new collection by Laura Reece Hogan, in Scientific American. Founded in 1845, the august publication is not known for its religious content. Yet Hogan, a lay Carmelite who lives in California, appeared in a recent issue with her poem “Lyrebird”. The poem is not directly spiritual. The narrator speaks of the lyrebird, who mimics the love songs of other birds. The poem, though, seeks to undermine its own proposed meaning and purpo ..read more

Guided by grace and humour. In the Stars the Glory of His Eyes: Tales of an Irish Tour Guide in Rome K Troy Ignatius Press, £13.99, 267 pages British readers of a certain vintage may remember a BBC radio comedy starring Stephen K Amos, the son of hard-working first-generation Nigerian immigrants, reminiscing about his experiences growing up black and gay in south London in the early 1980s. In one memorable episode, he is given the task of looking after the school rabbit over a weekend; a glorious collision of cultural expectations ensues, which culminates in his no-nonsense, straight-talk ..read more

Covert convert. A Faithful Spy Jimmy Burns Chiselbury, £22, 390 pages Anyone who thinks that fake news is a modern invention needs to read this book. From early on in its coverage of the Secret Service career of Walter Bell, it is clear that “intelligence” – like the news that is its progeny – has ever been a commodity to be bought, sold, manipulated and buried according to the needs of governments and their agencies. At first glance, Walter Bell, the middle-class son of a high-church Anglican clergyman, was an unlikely recruit to the Secret Service. Like the Cambridge spies Burgess, Maclean ..read more

How liberalism first failed. The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce and Crisis Richard Whatmore Allen Lane, £30, 480 pages It is sometimes said that moral philosophers spent the 19th century grappling with the French Revolution (or rather the following Terreur) much as their 20th-century successors did with the Third Reich. That is not to relativise the crimes of the latter but, rather, to help situate the dislocation felt by 18th-century thinkers faced with civilisational breakdown. Among the most shocking consequences of the Revolution, even to foreign Protestant eyes, was the despoiling ..read more

The Middle East: A Political  History from 395 to the Present Jean-Pierre Filiu Polity, £30, 356 pages This is a work of detailed knowledge about its subject and comprehensive in scope, even if its readability masks the scholarship behind the text. It alleges that other histories of the Middle East have concentrated on the religious factors underlying the nodal events which characterise the region, and which are now once again the focus of world attention. The author declares that his is a “secular” history (une histoire laïque du Moyen-Orient of the original French title). If by this he ..read more

Understanding the Hillybilly Thomist: The Philosophical Foundations of Flannery O’Connor’s Narrative Art By Fr Damian Ference OP Word on Fire, £20.00 Flannery O’Connor succumbed to lupus inherited from her father at the age of just 39 after defying prognoses of imminent death for seven years. Her demise in August 1964 spelled not only the tragic end of a young life but also the loss of a writer hailed ever since as the perhaps the finest and most gifted Catholic literary talent of 20th century America. Scholars still discuss her work today even though her professional career spanned less than ..read more

The willingness to sacrifice all for love. Of all the Catholic authors of the last century, JRR Tolkien is the best read – and astonishingly draws his readers, without any warning, into a Catholic mind. He does this with such sensitivity and subtlety that there is some scope for the Church, as part of its evangelistic and apologetic task, to offer to help our culture with the interpret-ation of what they find so entrancing, inspiring and beautiful. For the Catholic Church shares the same mould as the mind of Tolkien. Nonetheless, from the perspective of our secular culture, Tolkien can appear ..read more

Christie as a horror movie doesn’t work, says Julia Hamilton. A Haunting in Venice is the third in a trilogy of films produced and acted in by Kenneth Branagh as the celebrated and beloved detective Hercule Poirot. Every generation has its own Poirot – my favourite of all time is David Suchet, who simply is Poirot. Branagh, however, even with elabor-ately appropriate facial hair, still looks somehow like Branagh with stuck-on whiskers. The first film in Branagh’s trilogy was, of course, Murder on the Orient Express, followed by Death on the Nile which seemed, Christie-style, to have a curse on ..read more

Recovering our sanity. The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church James Kalb Angelico Press, £17, 228 pages I am sitting outside a coffee shop on the main street of Lander, Wyoming. A brown sparrow alights near my table, joining the already various pedestrian traffic: tanned climbers emerge from their bumper-stickered Subaru; a couple stroll out of the local college chapel down the street; overweight grandparents are walking their dogs; a bow-kneed old cowboy creaks out of his pick-up truck; a tattooed youngster with dyed hair flies past on his skateboard. For each, an ent ..read more