celticman's blog

On the cover is a picture of Lenny McLean, with a banner, The No.1 Bestseller and a quote (from Lenny) ‘I look what I am, a hard bastard’. The book has been ghost-written by Peter Gerrard who has worked with Reggie Kray and Ronnie Knight. The back cover shows a picture of a glowering Lenny with a sweep-over bald patch, wearing a white t-short, hands clenched as fists. The background shot is the sign for The Blind Beggar pub where Ronnie Kray...

The Rise and Fall of the Krays, STV, ITV Hub. https://player.stv.tv/summary/espresso-krays ‘Rise’—‘Fear and Fame’—‘Fall. The first episode charts how the Kray twins with a propensity for violence rose from a humble working-class background in the East End of London. We’re on familiar territory here. The wife-beating father, who kicked their mum in the stomach, and caused her to miscarry. But no mention of their older brother, Charlie. Her...

I’m not American, nor undocumented. I’m not a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. I’m a British citizen, born in Scotland who voted for independence in the recent referendum. I’d qualify for an Irish passport on my father’s side and probably my mother’s too. Neither of them was born in Ireland. A product of the great diaspora, when the population of Ireland halved from around 12 million citizens, and then almost halved again. President John F...

You’ve probably not heard of Jennifer Worth. Certainly, I hadn’t, when my sister gave me this book. You probably heard of Call the Midwife . It’s one of the most popular programmes on telly and a massive hit for the commissioners at BBC. It’s got everything you need: nuns in funny wimples and nurses dressed in uniform (with nursing hats made out of doilies) no nonsense matrons and cute as pie, newly born babies, which provoke a collective aahhhh...

I’m not a great fan of Elizabeth Strout. Yet I’ve read most of the books in this series ( My Name is Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Olive Again, and Anything is Possible ).William Gerhardt who Lucy was married to for twenty years, and had two daughters with, before they separated and she married David, the cellist (who died last year), would explain it in terms of compulsion. William admitted he had affairs when he was married to Lucy. That was...

Where there are sheep the wolves are never far away, Plautus. Danny Weston weaves a spell that adolescent children—and those that think young—should follow under a Hunter’s Moon. A combination of coming-of-age drama, morality play and a supernatural thriller. It resonates with contemporary themes and Scottish folk lore. Callum, aged fourteen, narrates. Kids will warm to him, because he is the feisty everyman-child. His father lost him in a card...

It’s been over 100 years since the war to end all wars. An impoverished and tubercular Gavrilo Princip, who carried all his possessions in a suitcase and had nowhere to stay when he arrived in Belgrade, firing the bullets in Sarajevo that killed Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-Este and the heir to the Habsburg throne for the cause of Serbian nationalism. Shots that rang around the world. Sophie Chotek, the Czech noblewomen, a love match and...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-killer-nanny-did-she-do-it/on-demand/71550-003 ITV showed a documentary about the trial of Louise Woodward on 11 th November 2021. Channel 4 covers much the same ground. But they tell the viewer they have the untold story. What they have are two jurors in the trial that found Louise Woodward guilty of murder speaking anonymously in this documentary. Both female jurors were fizzing that Judge Zobel had...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m0011cpr Jon Ronson has the kind of job I’d like. He meets interesting people and writes books that are worth reading. Here over eight episodes and around four hours he investigates the culture wars in American where he lives. They’re happening here in Britain too, with the little Trumpet Boris Johnson lying about Brexit to get elected and pretty much lying about everything else. But this is America, where the...

https://www.pbsamerica.co.uk/series/future-of-work/#6571 In this three-part series, The New Industrial Age, Future Proof, Changing Work, Changing Workers , Laurens Grant looks at the Future of Work . If you fell asleep while reading this far you are quite safe, because I’m not artificially intelligent. I’m not even intelligent. My feeble powers of fiction and non-fiction have already been far outstripped. Economics is a better bet. Quite a...