Blogs

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000dbcf/louis-theroux-selling-sex Louis Theroux is repeating himself. He’s done this before, tackling the sex industry, but now he’s looking the British model. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, in a Carry On kinda way. Sex sells even if it’s documentary sex and Theroux has pretty much a free hand with the BBC who buy any old muck he wants to sell. Selling sex is legal in Britain as long as it doesn’t involve...

I’m a bit stupid. I wasn’t sure if this was fact of fiction or fictionalised fact. I’m still not sure. This short book had me thinking, which is often a good thing. But I don’t really get it, which is a bad thing – right? I’ve been to a few funerals this year and I wrote in memorial that ‘Grief was too small a word’. Setting the tone in Max Porter’s book, split into three short chapters –beginning, middle and end—is not so much a prologue as an...

I read with sadness this morning that Neil Peart, drummer and lyricist of RUSH has died. He was 67. He and his bandmates, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson were a soundtrack and voice to my teenage years. Peart was a hugely accomplished drummer and undertook writing the band's lyrics when no-one else wanted to and drove the band's direction. For anyone who grew up in Ireland or the UK in the 1980's, the time was bleak, the weather seemed bleak, the...

“For there’s no-one with endurance like the man who sells insurance.” (Crumit / Curtis 1935) Or the modern author too. Eighty-five years after this song was composed and the start of a new decade, it’s all about endurance, persistence, self-belief and hard graft. I have just published my seventh novel: Eagles Hunt Wolves . It is the fifth and final part of a wartime series I started in 2006, beginning with Get Lenin which was published in 2011...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000d27r/storyville-jonestown-terror-in-the-jungle-episode-1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000d28j/storyville-jonestown-terror-in-the-jungle-episode-2 Most news stories start their pitch with the headline and in an inverted triangular shape begins to tell the rest of the story in terms of cause and effect. I’ll modify this a little here. Jim Jones was born in rural Indiana at the height of the...

History doesn’t run in straight lines. Robert A. Caro has focussed on a fixed point to talk about power. What it is? How it comes about. Who wields it? And how do they use that power? And in his biography of Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), in this first of four volumes, we follow not only the tale of LBJ, who becomes 36 th President of the United States, but the story of the United States, a modern history. Novels begin with flawed characters that need...

Our Story and Poem for the Month of December, very kindly chosen by Ewan: It’s the first time for a long while that I’ve had the honour of picking the best of the month’s work. It’s just as difficult as I remember to choose. As it’s December there was a great deal of very good work reflecting on the time of year. Pick of the Month goes to a returning ABC-er, the very talented Drew Gummerson for MovieLand! Parts 1,2 and 3, a short story hiding...

EAGLES HUNT WOLVES (and Improbable Adventures) – Robert Craven In 2006, I started writing an adventure story in the vein I grew up reading. In June 2011 it was published – Get Lenin . Five years of rewrites, excruciating edits, rejection letters and emails led to it being spotted on the now-defunct peer review site Authonomy. What sealed the modest publishing deal was the principal character Eva Molenaar. I wanted Eva to be a strong female...