celticman's blog

Goldstone BBC 4, BBCiPlayer, written and directed by Ivan Sen. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08x19x1/goldstone?suggid=b08x19x1 Mystery Road, BBC 4, BBCiPlayer, written by Michaeley O'Brien and directed by Rachel Perkins. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bl5l7q/mystery-road-series-1-1-gone If there’s a drama series on BBC 4, usually, I’m watching it. After the medieval Spanish drama, The Plague , I watched Mystery Road . No...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bn6tr3/storyville-jailed-in-america Roger Ross Williams recalled the time he first attended school in his home town of Easton, Pennsylvania and a white kid called him ‘nigger’. The white kid’s mum chastised him and told him not to do that or he would come and burn their house down. Here we are in Trump’s America, before the moron’s moron got to play at being presidential. Here we are in Trump’s America...

The Way of All Flesh is the way of man. I gave it a chance, got to page 50 and cut the cord. Read on. Edinburgh in 1847, was almost there on the page, but the narrators Raven and Sarah didn’t wind their way into my heart. Because it is not for me, does not mean it is not for you. That is the fickle way of all books.

hubris noun excessive pride or self-confidence. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bmbhzb/the-bank-that-almost-brok... Remember Blythe Duff, the actress who played Detective Jackie Reid in Taggart whose famous catchphrase, ‘Where’s the body?’ became much parroted. Ten years on Blythe Duff is the narrator in search of the body of capitalism, the rise and fall of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and the biggest bailout in British history,...

No surprise that Edith Eger’s The Choice has on the cover that overused marketing phrase ‘The International Bestseller’. That epitaph is a tombstone for many unremarkable texts, but this is a book that reads like a thriller, beautifully written, full of compassion and wisdom and can take its place among the greats of Holocaust memoirs alongside luminaries such as Viktor E Frankel’s who acted as a mentor for Eger and whose book Man’s Search for...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0000fk0/tommy-burns?suggid=m0000fk0 In the week of another lacklustre Celtic performance in Europe, and, ironically, when Celtic visit Kilmarnock’s Rugby Park on Sunday, this is a wonderful tribute to the evergreen Tommy Burns who died ten years ago, at the age of 51, of skin cancer, who managed both teams. Why a boy from the Carlton was on Gaelic telly I don’t know, and don’t care, I loved it. Tommy loved...

Sometimes we get caught up in hype and say things like Any Human Heart is ‘unforgettable’. But I’d forgotten I’d already read this book. There was something vaguely familiar about The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart (LMS) 1906-1991 when the reader is told he dies of a heart attack and on his tombstone has chiselled Escritor , Writer, Ecrivain . It’s the bit in between those two dates that interest us and LMS has a Zelig like ability to...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p06g8bcy/trust-series-1-1-the-house-of-getty Donald Sutherland is the eponymous John Paul Getty senior in BBC’s big-budget drama. My knowledge of Getty was negligible. I knew he was one of the richest men in the world and I knew he had a pay phone in his house, so unpaying guests wouldn’t chisel him and make long-distance phone calls at his expense. Yep, tick that one off; it happens in this drama, which...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/married-to-a-paedophile Married to a Paedophile was, ironically, on at the same time as another outstanding piece of drama, Mother’s Day . The latter is conventional drama in that we start with tragedy and end in triumph – The Good Friday Agreement. The argument is implicit, cause and effect. Married to a Paedophile is more of a Greek tragedy in which, for example, solving a riddle Oedipus on the way to Thebes...

We think we know the bare bones of the history of the holocaust. Hitler as bogey man and the German nation following him to the abyss, where around six million Jews perished and many more minorities. That was my take on it. Not bad, around a D grade. But Snyder does more than root in the history of the past. He drags us into the present and the lessons are illuminating. For the German nation the war was portrayed as necessary, a colonial war to...