Michael Duggan, Author at Catholic Herald

Michael Duggan

A memorable quest for Waugh’s better nature

August 11, 2016

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited by Philip Eade, Weidenfeld, £30 Great writer, unpleasant man. Such is probably the common estimate of Evelyn Waugh. “I am restless & moody & lazy & misanthropic,” Waugh himself once wrote to Laura Herbert. “I am jealous & impatient.” (He was successfully proposing marriage, by the way.) Philip Eade, his

Why Catholics make great managers

August 11, 2016

It’s back. The new Premier League season starts on August 13, just as fans finally stop shaking their heads in disbelief at the events of last season. Will the old order now reassert itself? Or has Leicester City’s staggering success somehow cracked it open? We shall see. But here’s a different kind of prediction. The

An old-school patriot pins down Englishness

July 28, 2016

English Voices by Ferdinand Mount, Simon and Schuster, £25 What makes England English? In his introduction to this collection of reviews of biographies and anthologies stretching across the past 30 years, Ferdinand Mount pins Englishness to the language and the common law. This is not necessarily an original conclusion, but it is no less valid for that.

A mind hissing and spitting with fury

July 14, 2016

The Devil’s Diary by Robert K Wittman and David Kinney William Collins, £20 The story of The Devil’s Diary opens in God’s Garden. In 1945, as General Patton’s army closed in, Nazi aristocrat Kurt von Behr was anxious to cut a deal with American military intelligence. His palace, a former Benedictine monastery, overlooked a stretch

A staggering story of hubris and hatred

June 30, 2016

Adolf Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939 by Volker Ullrich Bodley Head, £25 ‘It is the miracle of our age that you found me among so many millions.” So Adolf Hitler once told the German people. While the religious language is misplaced, he had a point. His journey from being a “stray dog” in Vienna to deciding the

Two characters in search of Europe’s soul

June 09, 2016

April 1944, occupied Crete. As dawn breaks, General Heinrich Kreipe stares at Mount Ida and murmurs some opening lines from Horace: “Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte…” (Do you see how Soracte stands there with its blanket of deep snow?) The young English officer sitting next to him – for Kreipe has been captured by

An agnostic demolishes anti-Catholic myths

June 02, 2016

Bearing False Witness by Rodney Stark Templeton Press, £19 The Age of Reason began in the 2nd century AD. How about that for a claim? Rodney Stark is not a man to equivocate. In his judgment, the Catholic Church has been routinely traduced by “distinguished bigots” – historians who have twisted or ignored the evidence

From mill workers to Oxford students

May 05, 2016

“On an October evening in 1921, one of the last of Oxford’s Hansom cabs clattered down the High, crossed Magdalen Bridge and stopped at 223, Iffley Road. From it emerged Fr Leo O’Hea, mill-worker Tom Leyland and Jack Shaw, a sheet-metal worker from Bamber Bridge. When they were joined by Bill Smith, a Newport engine-driver,

The knights who took on pirates, sultans and Hitler

April 21, 2016

Book review: The Knights of Malta by H J A Sire, Third Millennium, £35

The knights who took on pirates, sultans and Hitler

April 21, 2016

The Knights of Malta by HJA Sire Third Millenium, £35 In the Middle Ages, the Knights of Malta manned both the Hospital of St John in Jerusalem and the immense fortress of Krak des Chevaliers in Syria. They sent Suleiman the Magnificent packing at the Siege of Malta in 1565. Two centuries later, they were pursuing

The high watermark of Catholic Ireland

March 10, 2016

Catholic Ireland, as we knew it, is finished, it seems. When did this happen? The same-sex marriage referendum result – and, just as importantly perhaps, the way in which the debate unfolded – provides a clear marker, hard to quibble with. But Mary Kenny was already waving goodbye to Catholic Ireland in a book first

If Chesterton had been Irish

March 03, 2016

When an Irish president rises to speak to both Houses of Parliament at Westminster, as Michael D Higgins did in April 2014, the poets, soldiers and politicians he might turn to for an apt quotation are legion. As it happens, Higgins reached twice for the words of the same man, Thomas Kettle: a poet, soldier

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