celticman's blog

Edna O’Brien claimed The Country Girls wrote itself. The best books often do. Indeed it’s a marvel and she is a marvellous writer. It’s easy to make the mistake of confusing her with Caithleen (Cait) Brady. The teenage protagonist growing into womanhood in rural, 1950s Tuamgraney, East Clare, and later Dublin, with a little help from her frenemy Baba Brennan. Write what you know. O’Brien/Cait knows the in and outs of every field and path through...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-unlikely-pilgrimage-of-harold-fry Jim Broadbent usually plays somebody’s dad. Here he’s Harold Fry. Solid. Dependable. Middle-class and retired. In one of those long-standing relationships. Husband and his wife Maureen (Penelope Wilton) have signed a grief-fire. Both are retired, standoffish and stuck in their middle-class home getting further and further from each other and fading into the wallpaper. A...

BBC Radio Wales, BBC Sounds, Secrets of the Salt Path. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0n5p4w5 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0n7b8j7 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj32vx61x6lo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80p2pzgpmgo In films and television drama writers are one dimensional. Invariably, they are portrayed as some tortured soul that knocks off an international bestseller. It happens. Irvine Welsh is the poster boy...

I’d bought this book for 20 pence. I’d read the first page and thought this iit pretty good, which was a mistake, because it’s great. I read the start of the book during a hospital appointment and finished 410 pages later. I liked the Social Realism. Ben Creed is actually two writers: Chris Rickaby and Barry Thompson. I’m not sure how that works, but it does. I’m going to read their follow up books set in the same milieu, which is the USSR, one...

A writer’s job is simple as Satan testing Job. Take everything away and have the protagonist curse god (and die). Nobody much likes happy endings in The Bible or good books generally unless there’s been boils, blood, sweat and tears. Even then, somebody is going to get crucified. Tick list. Ray loses her home. Her husband, Moth has been casually told the good news from a medical specialist that they’ve identified his illness. A terminal,...

A simple way to think about Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story is True Perversion of Justice: The Donald J. Trump Story. In interviews the 47 th United States President between berating those that denied him the Nobel Peace Prize and starting his latest war with Iran finds time to comment on release of the latest batch of files relating to Jeffrey Epstein. This is a subject he his intimate and expert knowledge, the kind he claims...

Who are you and what are you? Rosaleen McDonagh’s collection of essays attempts to answer that question. ‘Unsettled’ is the title. The paradox: those she tries to unsettle don’t read books much and certainly don’t read books about ingrained prejudices with words like ‘intersectionality’, racism, ableism, and institutional abuse. Can you be made to care? The answer is no as McDonagh shows again and again. The shame is not hers but ours. But if we...

Damian Le Bas was born and bred a gypsy. We’ve all got ideas what that means. My middle name is Damain. I had to check if it’s spelled with an ‘a’ or ‘e’. I don’t use it much, but it’s there, lurking. Le Bas dedicates his book to his dad who died in 2017. His gypsy dad is my age, or would have been, if he hadn’t died. I’m pretty sure I’ve read this book before. Most books become mush in my head and I can usually pick out highlights that resonate...

Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venidtozzi (2025) How to Kill a Witch: A Guide for the patriarchy. ‘This book is dedicated to the people, mostly women, who were accused, tortured and executed as witches, and those who still face these unfounded accusations today.’ Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venidtozzi write about their ‘journey’ which began around 2020. What they wanted was a public apology and a memorial for those involved in these ‘historical outrages’...

I see dinosaurs every day. So do you. We call them birds. Hone addresses What We Don’t Know. What We Can, and What We’ll Never Know. He cites John Maynard Keynes Dictum: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind’. The study of fossils from tens of millions and millions of years ago is finite. The number of palaeontologists studying dinosaurs Hone suggests would comfortably fit in a research institute in the UK studying health. China has the...