At Valley House on Achill Island in 1894, an English landowner, Agnes MacDonnell, was brutally attacked and her home burnt. James Lynchehaun, her former land agent, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. He escaped twice and won a groundbreaking case in the United States successfully resisting extradition. . A Franciscan monk in Achill, Brother Paul Carney, who had befriended and assisted Lynchehaun, wrote up the fugitive's story, and Lynchehaun became a folk hero. John Millington Synge visited Mayo in 1904/1905 and decided to locate The Playboy of the Western World in north Mayo. Lynchehaun was one of Synge's inspirations for constructing the character of Christy Mahon. The crime, the trial and escapes, and the island tensions are unravelled in a gripping account.

This is the extraordinary story of an audacious fight for souls on famine ravaged Achill Island in the nineteenth century. Religious ferment swept Ireland in the early 1800s and evangelical Protestant clergyman Edward Nangle set out to lift the destitute people of Achill out of degradation and idolatry through his Achill Mission Colony. The fury of the island elements, the devastation of famine, and Nangle’s own volatile temperament all threatened the project’s survival. In the years of the Great Famine the ugly charge of ‘souperism’, offering food and material benefits in return for religious conversion, tainted the Achill Mission’s work. John MacHale, powerful Archbishop of Tuam, spearheaded the Catholic Church’s fightback against Nangle’s Protestant colony, with the two clergymen unleashing fierce passions while spewing vitriol and polemic from pen and pulpit. Did Edward Nangle and the Achill Mission Colony save hundreds from certain death, or did they shamefully exploit a vulnerable people for religious conversion? This dramatic tale of the Achill Mission Colony exposes the fault-lines of religion, society and politics in nineteenth century Ireland, and continues to excite controversy and division to this day.

Images and texts tell various stories about the Virgin Mary in Byzantium, reflecting an important cult with strong doctrinal foundations.

A study of the mysterious stone carvings of naked females exposing their genitals on medieval churches all over the British Isles.

Drawing from a rich corpus of art works, including sarcophagi, tomb paintings, and floor mosaics, Patrick R. Crowley investigates how something as insubstantial as a ghost could be made visible through the material grit of stone and paint. In this fresh and wide-ranging study, he uses the figure of the ghost to offer a new understanding of the status of the image in Roman art and visual culture. Tracing the shifting practices and debates in antiquity about the nature of vision and representation, Crowley shows how images of ghosts make visible structures of beholding and strategies of depiction. Yet the figure of the ghost simultaneously contributes to a broader conceptual history that accounts for how modalities of belief emerged and developed in antiquity. Neither illustrations of ancient beliefs in ghosts nor depictions of afterlife, these images show us something about the visual event of seeing itself. The Phantom Image offers essential insight into ancient art, visual culture, and the history of the image.

After being shipwrecked in the South Pacific, cousins Dick and Emmeline Lestrange are stranded upon an island, fortunately populated with plentiful resources and the beauty of nature. With the guidance of the ship’s cook, the only other survivor, they learn how to live off the land, foregoing their civilized upbringing and adopting a more primitive way of life. Of course, with this environment and its pleasures come a great number of dangers, from animal attacks to hazardous weather, and as Dick and Emmeline mature they experience one of the strongest forces of nature: love. Inspired by a sleepless night ruminating primitive man and how they might have responded to natural wonders, H. de Vere Stacpoole wrote and published The Blue Lagoon in 1908 to great praise and acclaim for its captivating descriptions of the titular lagoon, as well as for the character development of Dick and Emmeline as their romance blossoms. This adoration did not wane, with two sequel novels and a number of adaptations for stage and screen produced in the decades following its publication. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

For almost forty years, Fr Sean McManus has been at the heart of the Irish American campaign to pressurise the British government regarding injustice in Northern Ireland. This is a deeply personal account of how his lone voice mainstreamed Northern Ireland on Capitol Hill, after the Catholic Church removed him from Britain. He became 'Britain's nemesis in America', founding the Irish National Caucus in 1974. Also chronicles the events and social context that influenced him, growing up in a parish divided by the Border.