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When I can’t really settle, read or write, I turn my brain off and watch TV. There’s not much difference between my recumbent brain and my active brain, but a good way of telling the difference, without fancy machinery, is for the latter, to check whether my eyes are open. I initially thought A Very British Murder was something to do with George Orwell’s short article of the same name. It might well be there are another four episodes. In this...

The cover of this book reminds readers that Daniel Handler is the author of the Lemony Snicket series that’s why I gave it a chance. I’ve not read Lemony Snicket, but I did see a film starring Jim Carey playing a goofball Jim Carey character, which I quite liked. This I imagine is the jump to an adult version of children’s books. I got to page sixty of Flannery Culp’s diary. We immediately know she is in prison and she and her seven school...

There is little point in thinking about tenements and New York and putting the two together and imaging you have some kind of understanding as I did. Like me, you’ll probably be on the wrong continent. To make comparisons you need to think of other continents like the slums of Calcutta or pre-Communist Peking. 330 000 audited tenants per square mile in New York tenements of the 1890s. In The Bend between Broadway and the Bowery for example, were...

This story has two intertwining narratives and reads like a screenplay. It’s 392 pages and it can be read in one go, or two—as I did—it goes down smooth as Guinness. I only spotted one cliché, ‘it was like herding cats’ but that was 200 odd pages in and is forgivable because it was qualified by another image. McDermid was a journalist that lived in Fife. She has a visceral understanding of the what the miner’s strike of 1984/5 did to that...

The film opens with a clunky voice over with Charlie (Harvey Keitel) in a Roman Catholic Church having an extempore debate about the nature of hell and eternal suffering. He holds his fingers over a candle and tries not to flinch. Charlie’s idea of redemption is to try and save his younger cousin Johnny Boy (a young Robert de Niro) from the loan sharks he borrows money from. Charlie’s also having an affair with Johnny Boy’s cousin Teresa (Amy...

I, Tony Cook, will be stepping down as Editor on October 7th and Luke Neima will be taking over. This is a major step forward for ABC - Luke will be full time and he's committed to taking us onwards and upwards whilst still retaining all of our core values - open to all, free of charge, supportive and community led. I will still retain ownership of the site and will be involved at every step of the business - I just won't be doing all the day to...

I’d never heard of Ken Norton until I saw him fight Henry Clark in 1972. He knocked Clark out in the ninth round. He looked like a film star. He was an ex-marine with rugged good looks, droopy moustache and a physique that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Mister Universe contest. No wonder they called him “The Black Hercules.” Four months later he was fighting Muhammad Ali for the North American Boxing Federation ( NABF) Heavyweight title...

Last week Celtic were 10/1 with Paddy Power to win in the San Siro stadium. On paper this seems one of those stick-on, home-win, results. But it brought to mind the old days when we used to outplay Rangers, have most of the ball, miss most of the chances and then Laudrup would gallop up the park and score a goal for them. Job done. Celtic had more of the ball against Milan. They had the better of the chances, but they did not overly trouble...

I’d been looking forward to Saturday night for weeks. Floyd Mayweather was fighting Saul “Canelo” Alvarez for the light middleweight title in Las Vegas. It was only available on Box Nation and would cost me a tenner. To be honest I would have paid much more if I’d had to. In America the pay per view price was $79.95. Yep £50! Yet it was already destined to be the biggest pay per view audience ever. That’s how big this fight was. For those of you...

I quite fancied Peaky Blinder on BBC 2 or even Sound of the Cinema on BBC 4 but I wanted real drama and who could resist Teenage Exorcists -- Brynne Larson and her two best friends Savannah and Tess Scherkenback? As Brynne’s good old dad Bob tells every new audience he meets, he is the world’s best exorcist. To prove his point he can sell his audience DVDs of his top ten exorcisms, his no nonsense books of how to hook the devil out of your life...