celticman's blog

‘A spectre is haunting Europe,’ Archie Brown (2010) begins his book about the Rise and Fall of Communism. He wasn’t talking about Trump. Back then he was just another draft-dodging rapist and racist, who refused to rent property to black people, liked glittery things and to be on television. Putin had left the KGB and had set himself up as a fixer or mafia-type businessman, who retained strong links to his past. The spectre haunting Europe was...

Rebbeca Donner (2021) All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days. The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler. I write eulogies. They’re short as our lives. We lived. We died. But here’s a funny thing (you might not know) about those things that happened, in-between. These by far are my most popular posts. Well, apart from that one about a new bathroom—with pictures—that almost went viral. I’d people I don’t even know...

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: An American Story To be a true American is to welcome atrocities at home and abroad as signs of progress. Dismissing the shameful leadership in European capitals, excluding Russia, and in Israel. Rumi, a thirteenth century Persian/Palestinian poet recognised in ‘Only Breath’ common humanity: There is a way between voice and presence where information flows In disciplined silence it opens With wondering talk it...

I remember Pat Black from years ago from a defunct online magazine. One of us wrote ‘Nanny Gudgeon’s Teeth,’ and it wasn’t him, even though there was gold in that story. Good to see him becoming an international, bestselling celebrity. I thought I’d pop in and give the Ferryman a visit. ‘To Pay the Ferryman,’ is a play on words. You probably recognise the allusion to Charon. He’s the ferryman who transports souls across the river Styx to the...

Indians used to be the bad guys in movies. Whooping and swooping on peaceable white folk that were trying to murder them and steal their land. Familiar tropes such as the dumb blonde President that is also an insurrectionist, draft dodging, tax dodging, rapist—grab them by the pussy and friend of Jeffrey Epstein and Putin, kinda guy—are easily overused. A sympathetic look at the Seneca–Cayuga people and their allotted homeland of the Nation...

Flora and Son (2023) written and directed by John Carney. I’m not a great man for musicals. I’ll stretch to The Commitments . But recently I watched Kneecap . Like Flora and So n set in contemporary Dublin. The film was great. The music was shite. Like Flora, like son. Bertolt Brecht’s frequently quoted Motto comes to mind. It offers an excuse to seem vaguely knowledgeable, while being the opposite. In the dark time Will there also be singing?...

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is a page turner. It has been printed multiple times. On the cover it reminds readers that seven million copies have been sold worldwide. Simon May described Joel Dicker’s novel as his ‘book of the year’. The Truth About Harry Quebert is a book within a book. Harry Quebert mentors Marcus Goldman a younger writer. He gives him the inside slant of how to become a multimillion bestseller like him. All good...

You know what to expect with a Tom Hanks film. You expect Tom Hanks. So if you’ve got 37 merchant and troop ships crossing the Atlantic, you’ve got a Nazi wolf pack of U-Boats waiting to sink them—sneering over the ship’s intercom, ve have ways of making you sink—and you have a few British ships acting as escorts and a rookie boss (captain) in charge of a Fletcher-class destroyer and overall defence strategy, then we’d expect the U-boats to sink...

Warning: This book contains Tories. People whose sense of entitlement is so extreme they think they own Edinburgh, Scotland, the United Kingdom, Europe, the world, the universe…well, you get the picture. Tories. Hugo Rifkind is the son of Malcolm. Many of you might not know who that is or was. I do. Believe me. I do. It is with great regret that I admit to liking Rabbits . Tommo, the narrator, is a rich man’s Holden Caulfield. He goes to a...

Eighty years ago, today, 27 th January, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz death camp. In the same week as one of a handful of the the richest men in the world, Elon Musk denied giving a Nazi Hitler salute of the inauguration of the 47 th American President, we commemorate the Chinese Year of the Snake and the Holocaust. Mark Hodkinson’s biography isn’t about world leaders, with their Jupiter-sized egos. His story is about an ordinary man,...