celticman's blog

Lemn Sissay writes his memoir from a position of power. On the back cover, he lists some of his awards: BAFTA nominated, honorary doctorates, an MBE for services to literature, Chancellor of the University of Manchester. The last line is the killer. ‘He is British and Ethiopian.’ In other words, he’s a black man. He was the illegitimate son of twenty-one-year-old Yemarshet Sissy, a student at a Baptist Bible College in England, and he was born...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0011p18/vice Described as comedy-drama, a biographical film about former US vice-president Dick Cheney. Christian Bale won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of the most powerful vice-president in modern history. There is a contemporary joke that nobody is ever called Dick, but that’s about it. There is nothing funny about Vice . At a push, I could probably name most of...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0011f0c/portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire French with English subtitles. Writer and Director Celine Sciamma creates a beautiful vision. I struggle to speak English, and growl at anybody that suggests I’m not working class. Yet the channels I watch most are BBC 4 and BBC 2. Academics in the late 1960s tried to cobble together a theory that showed an erosion of working-class values with a more affluent class of car...

https://www.itv.com/hub/the-trial-of-louise-woodward/10a1090a0001 Matthew Eappen would be around twenty-five now, had he lived. Nineteen-year-old nanny, Louise Woodward was accused and found guilty of shaking the eight-month-old baby in her care so hard it caused subdural hematoma and killed him. Her trial, soon after the death of Princess Diana in 1987, was a media event—I don’t remember it, but watching footage Woodward’s pasty face was...

‘My name is Aidan and I am an addict.’ So what, you might say. You probably know the trajectory that follows. You’ve got Damian Barr, who grew up near Ravenscraig steelworks, a solid working-class town. Him being gay wasn’t his fault—or even a fault—but being a fucking Tory, Maggie & Me , was just a step too far. Deborah Orr, Motherwell: A Girlhood , which just about sums it up. You’ve got Kerry Hudson’s whimsical, Tony Hogan Bought Me an...

I find reading Acknowledgements instructive. Writing is a singular process, but a team game. When you write, or try to write, you look at books differently. You look at the cover and artwork [tick]. You look at the publisher: Faber [tick]. Fiona Scarlett has got the backing of the one of the major league publishers for her debut novel. You look at the blurbs on the back. What famous writers have been hooked in to add for added publicity,...

Samuel Shem (1978) The House of God. You might have read, Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor , or Jed Mercurio’s Bodies (before he became a multimillionaire screenwriter). You know what to expect an insider account of naïve young men and women moving outside the world of books and into a cult into which they will work day and night, with little sleep and little idea what they are doing, while wearing a white coat...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00116dq/the-exorcist I was around ten, big for my age, but not big enough to sneak into the La Scala and watch The Exorcist . The media warned us—don’t go. Rather than see it, there was talk of church boycotts and a spate of suicides. And those that did see it fainted, spewed up, or went insane. But my sister was made of stronger stuff. Jo even smoked and drank vodka. She wasn’t eighteen, but there was a...

Kate Summerscale is the author of the bestselling book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher , which was turned into a telly series. I haven’t read the book or seen the series. But after reading The Haunting of Alma Fielding , I’ll certainly need to add her work to my (growing) reading list. The beginning, middle and end—part 1, the ghost hunter, part 2, the ghost and part 3, the ghost—brings the reader from the pre-second-world-war offices of the...

Printed on a postcard, My Wife and Mother-in-Law, and distributed as a novelty by an unknown French artist (1888). They are both in the picture; find them? (p254-5). An old woman with a hooked nose, and her chin tucked into her fur coat is in one picture. The elegant young woman in the other. Initially, I couldn’t see the old woman, just the young. I tried rotating it. Blocking out parts of the picture and concentrating on where her long chin...