Inferior eclipse yesterday. I’d been hoping for a full-on seagull-shadow-on-sun effect, as depicted on Dublin’s streets.

Just six books in July, which continued the holiday fiction trend with a great introduction to Deighton followed by the peerless Jackson. The Iliad essays were timely and superb, Dirda on Doyle was fun, Cicero on friendship was excellent, and the Bangor book was odd but definitely worthwhile.

Was tempted earlier by the idea that I could see The Odyssey a third time, this time on the Superduperimaxscreen when visiting London, but it seems every showing is sold out to the end of time. In fairness, it’s very good, and improves with the rewatching.

With Irish stuff, it’s not just that it’s old, going back to at least the sixth century, but that despite the various destructions by Vikings and English, there’s still so, so much of it. Only in recent years have people actually mapped out how much we have.

Ah: one follower, and him wanting Ireland to rejoin the UK. I guess that’s the author, with some help from artificial “intelligence”.

Nine books for June, including some regular fiction for a change. The Véliz book could be the most important book you’d read this year, while I can see why Daniel-Rops is regarded as a classic and the Maritain is something for anybody thinking of rebuilding a broken and corrupted world.

Shoddy journalism here: “whether the ball had touched an overhead cable” when it had visibly been *deflected* by the cable in a way that changed the direction of play. The article makes it sound as though it just grazed the wire, a mere technical issue.

Looking forward to going to see Nolan’s take on The Odyssey next week, though it’s awful when people depict characters from poems set in Mycenaean times in Archaic Greek outfits and armour. (Or when they don’t go for the “Helen spent the war in Egypt, with a mere phantom in Troy” option.)

I’ll take “Things Dubliners would never say” for two hundred, please.

Syracuse proved an impressively theatrical place to visit. Can definitely recommend.

Just seven books in a less book-rich May than I’d hoped, though it was fun catching up with Saga which I’d been neglecting, and the other books were all worthwhile, with the one on the Cáin Adomnáin - which should be much better known - being particularly good.

Overall I tend to think that David Tracy had a good idea that Andrew Greeley explored in a specific Catholic v Protestant way, and then George Weigel and others almost propagandised it as a uniquely and universally Catholic thing.

There are very good reasons why the Vatican is saying that the big tech companies “exercise de facto power over the conditions of everyday life” and that it would be appropriate for States and transnational bodies to regulate and police them for the good of all.

It’s misleading for +Barron to say, for instance, that the Pope’s new encyclical places the moral legitimacy of private property and the free market alongside the universal destination of goods when it explicitly says they are subordinate to it and to the principle of solidarity.

I think “Roman Catholic” is pretty standard in England, fwiw. Here’s the sign you’ll see as you enter England’s Catholic mother-church, for example. There are some people here who tell Protestants off for using the term, but given this I think they’re just engaging in performative tantrums.

Some familiar spots on the flight this morning: the Menai Strait flying over Anglesey; Llandudno and Conwy; Brighton with the wonderful charred skeleton of West Pier just about visible; and finally Paris, where I’m currently waiting for my train. Meetings are on the cards.

I fear the portions weren’t always sensibly sized, mind.

I’m finding this book deeply frustrating. It’s readable, and I’m learning a fair bit, but it makes bizarre claims about the natures of friendship in the past and even on its own terms it has vast gaps that undermine the landscape it’s trying to map.

Headline-writers at @irishtimes.com, the winner getting one-and-a-half times the points of the runner-up is not “pipping them at the post”. I mean, be fair.

Honestly, I don’t see what the Pope has against manuscripts. We have some cracking ones in Dublin. Printed books are clearly for rank modernists.

I’m doing well on the auld culinary multitasking nowadays. Lunches are proving especially productive on the reading front.

You might be right, but there’s a school of thought - one I don’t buy - that American states basically are countries, and differ more than many countries do. That school may influence those who think America can’t be a nation in a meaningful sense.

Five books for April, with finishing the depressingly timely Hannah Arendt and the often timeless Chesterton collection taking most of the month. The Batman book contained some fabulously spooky detective stories, while Boyer was fun and Bratten Weiss was seriously thought-provoking.

Fun way to start my day - just a few weeks after the best royalty payment I’ve had in about a decade, I’ve finally used my author discount for the first time since I wrote my Cannae book half my life ago: www.amazon.co.uk/Cannae-Exper... Not a bad payoff for a master’s thesis!

In reality the Mother and Child Scheme mainly failed because doctors were opposed to it and because Browne - though a hero in some respects - was a bit of a bull in a china shop. Joe Lee is to the point on this. Unfortunately it’s become one of the great myth-topics of modern Irish history.

Clearly not.

As first days of summer go, that was a nice one. I enjoyed the company as I worked…

Not, I should stress, that he thought the objective horrors of war nothing to worry about - on the contrary, he thought them monstrous, and worried for the souls of those who did not do likewise!

Over some light lunchtime reading, I’m struck by how Augustine thought war’s objective horrors less important than participants’ spiritual state, and how it’s odd anybody would think an attack called “Operation Epic Fury” - “Massive Tantrum” being too on the nose - might in any sense be a just war.

Not a bad evening, that: a glorious sunset over the Boyne, and the finale for what I’d be pretty confident in describing as by some way the best adaptation of “The Count of Monte Cristo” I’ve ever seen.