Towards the end of his beautiful meditation on the long, still robust life of his grandmother Imogen Stuart, Emile Dinneen ventures to ask her: “So, do you ever think about the meaning of life?” She is sitting in her studio, sculptor’s smock on. Outside, it is one of those indolent summery days. “The meaning of life?” Stuart repeats as though she’d never heard such a preposterous idea. Given that Stuart grew up in Weimer Berlin as a daughter of privilege in a Jewish-German household, met and then married Iseult Gonne and Francis Stuart’s son Ian; moved to Ireland to live...