“Anything strange or startling?” That’s how my da, Bob, opens our conversations. We’d meet in our “local” pub in Dalkey, Dublin. Finnegan’s is its own country with its own laws and customs. Time is said to change shape on crossing its door. I have experienced that. It’s a constitutional monarchy with Dan Finnegan the head of state, his sons effectively running the government with his eldest, Donal, the prime minister. Donal is 6ft 4in but, depending on the hour and the state of the state, can appear 6ft 7in. I would not want to mess with Donal Finnegan.
Dan Finnegan loved my da. They shared a love of opera and stage musicals, and Dan recognised when another prince was present, one who could actually sing. On the occasion when my father silenced the place by singing The Way We Were followed by The Black Hills of Dakota, Dan looked over at me with something like pity, and I imagined him speaking under his breath, “Think how far you’d have come if only you had your father’s voice.”
EastEnders debuted in a crowded field of British soaps: Coronation Street was already 26 years old, while Emmerdale and Brookside were popular too. But in just one year, EastEnders had beaten Coronation Street's all-time most-viewed episode by 10m viewers. Why was it so popular? "On Coronation Street, the scenes in Rover's Return had become sedate: nobody passed the camera, there was no background noise, no one was fighting to be heard," Cashman says. "But in EastEnders there was life. It shook things up and brought Coronation Street back to life too."
The rivalry between these two soaps endures today, with Coronation Street back on top – for now. But the reality is that Britain is no longer as engaged with the soap genre as it was. Last Christmas, just 2.9 million tuned in for the Christmas Day Eastenders episode, making it only the 10th most-watched programme on Christmas Day overall, where it used to regularly top the ratings. And it's not just EastEnders: "While TV viewing as a whole fell by 9% between 2017 and 2019, Coronation Street's audience fell by 19%, while Emmerdale's went down by 22%,” noted Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian earlier this year.
John Banville's novels come and go but not all of his characters depart with them. Some remain in limbo and then return with a new lease on life in a sequel or next installment in a series. In his latest novel, "The Singularities," the Booker winner tries something more ambitious by bringing back diverse characters from disparate books and letting them intermingle. As they do so, they find themselves navigating a warped reality made up of various possibilities and blasts from the past.
“The Confessions of Matthew Strong” has been categorized as a thriller, and fans of the genre will delight in Power-Greene’s studied interpretation: His deft choreography inspires genuine suspense. But despite the generic twists and turns, the novel is most compelling when it slips into the more modest trappings of psychological drama.
Isobel’s synesthesia is a gift as a seamstress, but as Albanese ramps up the tension in a harrowing plot, it becomes evident that her belief in her gift has skewed her sense of others. A world built on visual difference offers us back only our distorted reflections. In order for Isobel to survive, she will have to learn to apprehend what lies beneath the cloth she stitches for others.
The book unpacks these layers of history like those of the sandwich itself – Cuban bread filled with seasoned pork, sweet ham, Swiss cheese, pickles and mustard – to understand where it came from and how it has evolved. It weaves together research and profiles of artisans who are making the sandwich in different parts of the world today.