Sir, - Yet another Saturday has come and gone and I have perused with, by now, resigned despair The Irish Times two page book review section. This week (April 5th) we were treated to discussions of the work of such household names as Cesare Pavese and Marie de Hennezel, a biography of the one and only Studs Terkel (who reads these books?), as well as largely redundant notices of what is, to say the least, the umpteenth reprint of Fowler's The King's English (1906), a well and truly posthumous collection of bits and pieces by A. J. P. Taylor, and a £4.99 Penguin Classics edition of a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.
It is none of the above, however, which has completed me to put pen to paper. One can live with this. What is especially irritating is Eileen Battersby's review of A Modern Traveller to the Early Irish Church, by Kathleen Hughes and Ann Hamlin.
This is a fine book, by two respected scholars in the field, and Ms Battersby's discussion is measured and, as ever, eloquent (although hers is hardly the first name that springs to mind as a reviewer of a work on early medieval Irish history and archaeology). But again, perhaps, one can live with this.
The real problem is that the book in question is 20 years old, and one of its authors, sadly, 20 years dead. The volume has undoubtedly become scarce, and one is grateful to the ever excellent Four Courts Press for reprinting it. But with all due respect, it is not a major event in Irish publishing in general, or in the publication of work on medieval Irish history and archaeology in particular.
One wonders, then, why, within days of its appearance, it was accorded top billing in your Saturday review section. Was it the luck of the draw? Did the nice photograph on the cover happen to catch the eye of some passerby in The fresh Times office?
The odd thing is that Ms Battersby concludes her review by criticising (quite sensibly) the reprinting of the book without account being taken of "current archaeological research, survey and publishing activity". May I conclude by asking how much of this recent archaeological publishing activity has The Irish Times deemed worthy of notice? - Yours, etc.
Department of Medieval
History,
Trinity College,
Dublin 2.