Killing Time
By Alan Bennett
Faber & Faber, £10
In Killing Time, Alan Bennett takes on a challenging task: writing a comedy set in a care home at the onset of Covid. The premise is pure Beckett, but Bennett’s style is irrepressibly cheerful. His cast of elderly eccentrics fills their days with jaunty dialogue and reflections on ageing. There are a few moments of real sadness and perhaps too many feeble attempts at observational humour. (“Locating his penis nowadays involved a degree of delving.”) Despite the general tweeness, Killing Time makes a good point about the inescapably personal way we contextualise the darkest moments in history. Towards the end of the novella, an elderly woman, sensing her own death nearby, looks out at a bonfire and remembers surviving the Blitz as a child. “And watching the glow of London burning night after night she had not despaired. There would be a better time. Now, she was not so sure.” Ruby Eastwood
Anarchy and Authority: Irish Encounters with Romanov Russia
By Angela Byrne
Lilliput, €18.95
Mentions of Dubliner John Field’s nocturnes and of Tipperary-born Laurence Sterne’s novels in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace show how Irish cultural exports had penetrated to the remote and vast Russian empire in the mid-19th century. Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies and the plays of Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan were also popular among the cultured elite in Tsarist Russia, which was then the world’s largest contiguous empire, covering one-sixth of the earth’s surface.
[ The Irish naval officers in imperial RussiaOpens in new window ]
Historian Angela Byrne’s exhaustively sourced compendium trawls the memoirs of Irish-born diplomats (for Imperial Britain), professionals (soldiers, medics, engineers, nannies) and adventurers who visited Russia in the years between the Battle of the Boyne and the 1917 Revolution. Ray Burke
Bone Black
By bell hooks
Dialogue Books, £10.99
As a child with “too much spirit”, bell hooks, found her place in words; “This is my home. This dark, bone black inner cave where I am making a world for myself.” In this “newly recovered classic”, first published 28 years ago in the United States, the prolific late author and feminist intellectual, (author of beloved TikTok mainstay, “All About Love: New Visions”), delivers a beguiling account of girlhood in the American south. hooks’ prose upholds an enchanting sense of childish confusion and curiosity, and, most importantly, confronts the child’s favourite question – “why”. Why are girls treated as inferior to boys? Why are black people considered lesser citizens? Why is passion shameful? No doubt, many readers have found, and will continue to find a home in hooks’ formidable work. Brigid O’Dea
