celticman's blog

The librarian looked at me when I checked this book out. I’m used to this, being very handsome, a bit like a young Sean Connery only older and balder and a bit more in the beef stakes. But the librarian was a man. I’ve nothing against that kind of thing. These barriers are breaking down. If a librarian wants to be a man and wants to gawk at me and manhandle my choice of book then that’s his perogative. He looked as if he wanted to say something...

You’ve got to watch Derren Brown. He’s so good as what he does that when he tells Ivan Massow that he will steal a painting worth £100 000 from a pop-up art exhibition he’s organising, tell him the day when he’s going to do it, the time he’s going to do it -3pm- and gives the art dealer a picture of the person that’s going to steal it for him, then you expect him to be able to do it. He bets Massow a nominal £1 that he will and lets him organise...

The first Inspecting Captain of Submarine Boats, as they were called, was advised never to go near them by the Director of Naval Construction, Sir William White, as he had once descended in a submergable boat in a London dock in 1887 and had been stuck on the bottom for an hour or so. Three American type ‘Holland’ submarine boats were built in Barrow in Furness in 1901. They were sixty-three feet long and were shaped—in a way associated with...

Lily Bere is determined to kill herself. Her beloved grandson Bill, a Gulf War veteran is dead and her life seems blighted, but as an eighty-nine-year old woman she can hardly muster the energy to commit herself to that final act. Her life has been full of loss and betrayal. She takes us back to the tranquil times before the Eastern Uprising when her dad had risen to chief superintentant of Division B, one of the top police officers in Dublin...

Let me begin with a confession, whenever Celtic are playing Barcelona, whether home or away, and some ‘neutral’ asks me what the score will be I always say Barcelona will win 3-0. I assume that Barcelona are at least three times better than Celtic. Yet I stuck a couple of quid on Georgios Samaras to score first and Celtic to win 1-0 (200/1). For that to happen the footballing universe must turn slightly the wrong way and our goalie must have the...

This is Munro’s first book, a collection of fifteen short stories, won her Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s award and put her name on the literary map. The literary ghosts of rural Canada and later characterisations are here. Her father is here in shadow form, unable to make a living despite working 365 days a year, seven days a week, farming furs like minx and fox, penned up in small cities with their own walkways. Her mother is here ‘...

Don’t every wipe tears without gloves is in the first shot, of the first scene, of the first episode (this was the second episode) and is a piece of advice given by a senoir nurse to her more junior partner as they tend to a bedridden youth in a Stockholm hospital in the 1980s. Both nurses wear protective masks and boots and are amoured against this new virus HIV that is contagious in a way that people don’t really understand. The contagiant in...

American blue-blood Truman Capote’s factionalised account of the murder, Saturday, 14th November 1959, of forty-eight year old William Clutter, his wife ‘poor’ Bonnie (nee Fox) who had ‘little spells of melancholia’ three years younger than him and two of his teenage children who lived at home with them, the teenagers Nancy, who was pretty and popular and Kenyon who was more reserved, was a blueprint for later works such as Norman Mailer’s The...

‘When I speak of Tories,’ Bevan said, addressing the Durham Miner’s Gala in July 1948, ‘I mean the small body of people who, whenever they have the chance, have manipulated the political influence of the country for the benefit of the priveledged few. I am [son of a Welsh miner] prepared to forgive and forget the wrongs done to me. I am not prepared to forgive and forget the wrongs done to my people.' Labour's response was the creation of the...

It’s been over thirty years since I’ve read this book. And it’s over a 100 years, two world wars, the Holocaust, use of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, countless other wars, great depressions (including this one) since the working conditions that Tressell descibes so well have receded into the past. When I first read this book I remember feeling angry and somewhat excited that somebody understood that life didn’t have to be that way. Now I’m more...