celticman's blog

My pet theory is that authors write the same book again and again, until they get it right (write). James Robertson writes about Scotland. No headline there. He always writes about Scotland. He can mix it up a bit with Saints, God and the Devil, but you know where you are with him. Here we have an ensemble cast that takes us from Scotland in the 1950s to the kind of Scottish Devolution nobody much wanted, but we settled for. The book kicks off...

Around seventy years ago, Mahmood Mattan was hanged for the murder of Lily Volpert, a shopkeeper, who happened to be Jewish and under five-foot tall. His conviction was found to be unsafe by the three Appeal Court judges in 1998 and he was exonerated. In the Epilogue, Mahmood’s son Omar was found dead on a beach in Caithness, Scotland. He’d said in an interview: ‘Until I was eight, I was told my father had died at sea. Then one day the Salvation...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0b64mbt/house-of-maxwell-series-1-episode-1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0b64n6s/house-of-maxwell-series-1-episode-2 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0b64nww/house-of-maxwell-series-1-episode-3 Who are you? What are you? Robert Maxwell. 'All life is a choice. And if you want to succeed, you’ve got to commit yourself. Be single-minded. Duty is more important than love. That’s what I was...

Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel about a magical underground railroad that took slaves from the South not to safety, but not to slavery either. Harlem Shuffle has no such tropes. Ray Carney is trying to get by selling furniture on 125 th Street. 1959, America is on the up and up. Not that you’d know if you were a black man. He needs to walk the line of being crooked enough to be straight. Everyone is on the take from the cop...

Roddy Doyle makes you smile. You just need to think of that line from The Commitments , ‘We are the black men of…’ whatever it was. I’m never very good at remembering. He wrote about the housing crisis in Dublin. Rosie ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p09lk76z/rosie ). How letting the market sort things out is darkest doublethink, whilst helping take a hammer to poor people’s lives. What I’m building up to saying is aye, Roddy Doyle, but...

Oscar Wilde: ‘Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has ever read history, is a man’s original value.’ A writer’s job is to remember. The better the writer, the better we remember. I’d a day out at The Golden Friendship Club on Saturday. Jim McLaren performed two miracles—and perhaps there’ll be a play about that one day—buying the old Masonic Club and finding the money to renovate it. If he wants to hang a picture of his mum, Agnes, and...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00156cw/storyville-tango-with-putin?page=1 Memory is always being subverted. Tango with Putin begins with the Muscovite fairy-tale princess and her pink car looking for a prince. Natasha and Sasha…and they lived happily ever after in their castle. James Cameron (reporting on the North Vietnamese): ‘They whispered that I was their dupe, but what they really meant was I was not their dupe.’ The princess wants...

Storyville, Final Account, BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, Director Luke Holland https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0013vf3/storyville-final-account The simplest path is that of force. The crooked path is that of rhetoric and ideology. I ask myself a question here: Could I have done this. Could I have massacred men, women and children? My sympathy is not with the Nazis, but the victims of Neo-Nazism. My answer is Yes. Like 99% of other Germans I’d have...

Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist, author and critic of Vladimir Putin was murdered in her apartment in central Moscow 7 th October 2006. Ryszard Kapuscinski. Imperium : ‘All dictators, regardless of epoch or country have one common trail: they know everything, are experts on everything.’ Chechnya: A Dirty War 4 th November 1999. ‘You probably think I’m writing this to stir your pity. My fellow citizens have indeed proved a heard-hearted...

Ryszard Kapuscinski was born in 1932 and grew up in the Polesie region on Poland (today Belorussia). Pinsk was liberated by Soviet troops in 1939. From what wasn’t clear. He learned the Cyrillic Russian alphabet as school from a single copy of Stalin’s Studies in Leninism, watched arbitrary mass deportations to Siberia and starved with his family. He remained liberated for most of his adult life and witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989...