Book Reviews
| Home of the Gentry; On the Eve by Ivan Turgenev |
| The Silence of Animals by John Gray |
| Honoré de Balzac Selected Short Stories |
| Silence a Christian History |
| Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch will be known to many from his popular series The History of Christianity which went out in late 2009 on BBC Four. |
| That series was based on his landmark book, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. In his new book the eminent historian argues that Silence has characterised much of what the church was about through the centuries. |
| The author also makes reference to the enforced silence of an estimated 120 million Christians in the Indian sub-continent and in China who are prevented by government power or the hositilty of non-Christian neighbours from practsimng their faith. |
| He also examines the silence attendant upon being homosexual and Christian. MacCulloch’s style is witty, and accessible, as one would expect from a man who has had an eye to presenting relatively complicated material on prime time television. |
| Levels of Life by Julian Barnes |
| Julian Barnes – who won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending - was married for 30 years to literary agent Pat Kavanagh. Aged 68, his wife died in 2008, after suffering a brain tumour. |
| Barnes comes at the kernel of the story sidelong, as it were. In the first part, he recalls 18th and 19th century balloonists. |
| The second part describes the love affair between the actress Sarah Bernhardt and the balloonist Colonel Fred Burnaby Barnes is such an imaginative writer, that the business of flight and being above the world with confidence in the nineteenth century somehow governs and validates the story of his own contemporary marriage. Paddy Kehoe |
