celticman's blog

David Szalay (2025) Flesh won the 2025 Booker Prize. That puts David Szalay into the stratosphere of book sellers. Last year’s winner, Orbit , Samantha Harvey’s quote on the cover is ‘Brilliance on every page’. ‘When he’s fifteen, he and his mother move to a new town and he starts a new school. It’s not an easy age to do that – the social order of the school is already well established and he has some difficulty making new friends. After a while...

‘Can we enter heaven with one leg?’ The little girl named Saja in Jabela, who lost her leg in an Israeli airstrike on her house before entering an eternal sleep due to the destruction of all hospital in Gaza had asked I think she entered with two.

Leonardo Da Vinci (2024), BBC iPlayer, Written by Sarah Burns and David McMahon, narrator Keith David, Director Ken Burns. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m00264cj/leonardo-da-vinci https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0026ch9/leonardo-da-vinci-series-1-2-part-two-paintergod https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_(2024_film) Ken Burns that heavyweight of public service films and whose documentary films have attempted to explain...

I had to check Allan Bennett is still alive. He’s 91 now. Books don’t have to be new to be read. His diary entries and moral outrage with Tony Blair as he cosied up to George Bush (junior) over the invasion of Iraq over dumbed up files that never existed…well, with the moron’s moron Trump treating the Doomsday Clock as a pinball machine that spits out Nobel Peace Prizes we’re beyond satire, but not common sense. Bennett has got more than a wee...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002q9qq/confessions-of-a-killer https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002q9sg/confessions-of-a-killer-series-1-2-judgement-day Why would a killer admit to being a killer? Confessions of a Killer are as old as Adam and Eve, Cain and Able. Printed fiction and stage-plays such as Jekyll and Hyde , fed into a penny-dreadful need to know more. To feel more. To become involved in what happens next. True-crime...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002pvjy/lollipop Wikipedia Lollipop is a film with a simple enough plot. Molly Brown (Posy Sterling) is a recently paroled mother. She wants to get her kids back before she does anything else, which is heart-warming. A familiar fix for the 60%-70% of the 3500 women imprisoned in England and having children under 12, mostly serving sentences of less than 12 months. Unless you’ve got money, are comfortably...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kindness_of_Strangers_(film) Sometimes we don’t know what to write. I thought this film would be shite, but it was really good, sums it up. Nobody really cares. The Kindness of Strangers others that. It’s the basis of most religions. We are what we give. Not in the hope of receiving, or as a morality play (although that may be part of that thing we call being truly human) or even the anguished cry of Marlon...

Elvis v Priscilla. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002nzws/elvis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_(2022_film) https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002b8kn/priscilla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscilla_(film) Music and me, we don’t talk or do that walk. If the slim-hipped whip of a boy is someone the old dears in The Mountblow watch doing Karaoke turns out to be a bulky and grey haired John Brady, they never let on. I guess mums...

Dr Tony Redmond (2021) Frontline. Saving Lives in War, Disaster and Disease Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo (1939) Andrea: “Unhappy the land that has no heroes.” Galileo: “No. Unhappy the land that needs heroes.” Dr Tony Redmond is no fictional hero. But we kind of already know him. Born into poverty. A man that wants to help others—no matter what or where they are. He’s paid the price. Almost a millimetre from total paralysis, the discs in his...

Julian Hoffman is trying to find a place in our ponderous world for wonder, or what he terms ‘radical amazement’. The beauty of connection in the age of desolation. ‘When it’s gone, it’s gone,’ he argues. He asks what are those special qualities that make us human? Our sixth sense, writer Rebecca Solnit calls it. Cultural as well as natural meaning. Lived experiences that act as in internal compass mapped by memory and spatial awareness. I think...