celticman's blog

Sex sells. It’s older than Adam and Eve. Whisper it, before the internet, people had sex and were even naked together, sometime even at the same time, in the same room, without a phone. Hallie Rubenhold has turned a Ph.D. into an international bestselling book of non-fiction (which we used to call factual) based on a list of prostitutes that sold their bodies around the Covent Garden region of London. Her parameters of study were centred on a...

Most of us will have heard of Jack the Ripper. Perhaps I should modify that statement and say most of us over forty will have heard of Jack the Ripper. In one film, the premise was Jack the Ripper was a crown prince or some kind of royalty. His killings were quickly covered up by members of the establishment. I couldn’t have told you how many women he killed—five—or where—Whitechapel—other than it being generally a smog filled London. No thought...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/girl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_(2018_film) Girl is front-page headlines. Not the Belgian entry for the 2018 Cannes Film Festival that won most of the major award but grandstanding between factional groups amid a British Supreme Court’s ruling that men who change gender—through hormone treatment and surgery—are not legally women. Even the use of the term men or women here is problematic. A ruling that...

Most authors of what is called non-fiction, but used to be called factual (before the advent of fake news) let the reader know who they are and why they’re qualified to write the book, you’re reading. It’s very much in the same way author’s query agents or publishers. On the cover of the book, it tells us potential readers who he is and what he does: ‘The Extraordinary Life and Career of Britain’s Leading Forensic Psychiatrist’. Dr Duncan tells...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/radical/on-demand/76952-001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(film) Matomoris, Mexico 2011. (Based on a true story). Daniel Haddad as Chucho , headteacher of Jose Urbina Lopez Primary School. ‘Primary education is compulsory and free, but over 50% fail to make secondary education. We’re failing and test scores place us at the very bottom. Nobody cares what happens here. Just don’t go around kicking...

Amityville an Origin Story. BBC iPlayer, Directed by Jack Riccobono. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m001vdxj/amityville-an-origin-story https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001vdxn/amityville-an-origin-story-series-1-2-the-crime https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001vdxq/amityville-an-origin-story-series-1-3-the-big-time https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001vdxs/amityville-an-origin-story-series-1-4-the-feedback-loop I watch...

Callum McSorley (2023) Squeaky Clean. Not many people read the Acknowledgements. They’re on page 383, at the end of a book, I read in one go. It’s one of those books I read and think I could write—and have written versions of it. Working class people having a shite life. I read a review on Peter Turns the Page and knew this would have been the kind of book I like because it’s about people like me. The author’s job is to make their shite life...

I read every day. Less than 1% of what I read is poetry. And Ann Michaels Held isn’t a poetry book. But it’s got that feel about it. I checked the number of pages. 220. Because I also write, I’d estimate that’s between 60 000 to 80 000 words. I’d like to be more precise. It’s been a couple of days since I finished it (meaning to review it) and had to look at the Contents page. Now we’re getting somewhere. The first six chapters are labelled...

Drew Gummerson would be high on the list of books that need to be banned and burned in the good old US of A by the followers of the moron’s moron cult and stealer of elections he, apparently, never stole. Short stories that become longer stories. Fey wee folk that become fucking big folk that catch up with their shopping with their dead sister who gets stroppy about what you’re buying. (It happens.) A young boy, Ginny, with a massive wanger that...

Polly Tonybee is an author who writes regularly for The Guardian and Observer . You’ve probably guessed by that she’s left-leaning and middle class. An Uneasy Inheritance shows that doing good is not the same as being good. Her family includes the leading intellectuals of their day, including Arnold Tonybee, the economic historian and social reformer who charted the miserable conditions of how the working class lived in the late nineteen century...