celticman's blog

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001ckxy/harriet There’s an old trick for a director to add a few lines of text and also claim credit as a writer. Harriet is about slavery. Black people were bought and sold like slaves (and still are). You’ve probably had a mental blip, because it’s clichéd. From Prince claiming he was a slave and changing his name to a squiggle during a contractual dispute with his record company. In contrast, Liz Truss...

The formless nought. That was my thinking when I heard Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng mentioning ‘the people,’ ‘the people’ he talked to, ‘the people’ he listened to, ‘the people’— Not my people. Not me. Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, friend of Queen Victoria, leader of the Conservative Party and twice Prime Minister but also a writer. Sybil (1845), for example, brought the two nations argument into dining rooms. The...

The title struck me. I was glad my mum died too, but for different reasons. She had Alzheimer’s and her life wasn’t a life. The front cover has two quotes from famous people saying nice things about Jennette McCurdy’s autobiography. Jerrod Carmichael ‘Impressively funny’. I didn’t think so and I don’t know who that is. But before reading this book, which I did mostly in one sitting, leaving the last few chapters until the next day, I didn’t know...

The cover is a give-away: ‘A Father Behind Bars/A Daughter Determined to Free Him.’ Obviously I hadn’t been paying attention. I thought the narrator was a young black man. In the Author’s Note, Dick Lehr tells the reader the facts. ‘Nothing But the Truth has its origins in one of Boston’s most notorious murders—the shooting of twelve-year-old Tiffany Moore on a hot summer night in 1988. Tiffany was seated on a blue mailbox in Roxbury, swinging...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0cgqlv1/big-oil-v-the-world-series-1-1-denial https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0cgqlv7/big-oil-v-the-world-series-1-2-doubt https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0cgqlvk/big-oil-v-the-world-series-1-3-delay Your children are going to die. Here’s why. ‘We must not only go to zero emissions , we must actually remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere ’ (italics around text are Peter Wadhams (2016) A...

1785, before the emptying of The Bastille, The Great Terror and La Guillotine will separate the heads of the aristocracy from their bodies Jean-Baptiste Baratte is given a simple task by a Minister to empty a cemetery, Les Innocents. It lies in the centre of Paris. The putrefying dead are causing such a stink it might even affect the health of the Sun King, Louis XIV at his palace in Versailles. ‘The palace is full of mirrors. Living here it...

The Washington Post called Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel ‘a classic of war fiction’. The New York Times a ‘tour de force’. Yes and Yes. The narrator has written a confession. Looked out at the shore of himself. And decided there was nothing to see. What fuelled him wasn’t nihilism, but idealism. But that too was a lie. Something he was adept at. Being the bastard son of a priest. At fourteen, his Vietnamese peasant mother became the French father’s...

Eric Holthaus is a meteorologist and he wanted to do something about global warming. He wrote a book and finished it November 2019. Here is some advice he gives: ‘The key to writing a good book is to write a bad book and then fix it.’ I like that. The key to writing a book is firstly to finish it. Then to fix it. Holthaus managed that. He’s an optimist. ‘In 2035’, for example, he suggests, ‘global emissions finally started to sharply decline—...

A woman of ninety-six died. I don’t need to tell you she was old. In another life she’d have made a decent teacher of French and English, who sometimes rapped your knuckles. But we acted in concert as if it was a surprise, with the odd bum notes. My worry was that football would be cancelled and I’d miss Rangers getting stuffed for the third time in a just over a week. As a destitute person—of the no dogs, no coloured and no Irish—I’m aware rich...

Frankie Boyle is a Scottish comedian. No Mean City . Meantime. The Scottish bit suggests that there is an outside chance he might be funny. But after comedian, I need to write, allegedly. Everybody in Glasgow thinks they are a comedian. In fact, that’s often a reason for a square-go: ‘You think yer a comedian, pal?’ Everybody in Glasgow also thinks they’re a writer, including me. The proof is in the booze and also in the number of copies sold...