Blogs

The Trial of Alex Salmond, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, Director Sarah Howitt and narrator Kirsty Wark.

Posted by celticman on Wed, 19 Aug 2020

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000lwld Droit du seigneur #MeToo in the Middle-Ages – A supposed legal right in medieval Europe, allowing feudal lords to have sex with subordinate women on their wedding night (or whenever). #MeToo in the twenty-first century, Scotland’s former First Minister Alex Salmond, March 2020, at the High Court in Edinburgh, was found not guilty of thirteen charges of sexual misconduct, including an attempted rape in...

READING NIGHT - IMPORTANT NEWS AND A SNEAK PEAK AT OUR READERS' LIST!

Posted by Insertponceyfrenchnamehere on Sat, 15 Aug 2020

News just in from Mark Burrow: I’m delighted to say the list of readers is building up for our Virtual Reading Night on the 27 th – 19:00 to 20:30 (GMT+1). We have brilliance on display in the form of Onemorething, Drew Gummerson, Sean McNulty, Rhiannonw, Mark Say, lavadis, hudsonmoon, Philip Sidney, noo, airyfairy and Simon Barget. More to be confirmed shortly. Yes, we’re doing it by Zoom. Yes, that means it’s a video call and yes that means we...

Craig Robertson (2010) Random

Posted by celticman on Fri, 14 Aug 2020

This book is a bit of set-up for a debut thriller writer. The tag on the front cover tells the would-be reader, ‘Six Victims, One Brutal Killer, No Rhyme, No Reason, No Mercy’. The hard-sell for crime fans. And in smaller font it tells you this guy is like Mark Billingham and Val McDermid. Wow, I say, I’ll need to read this, it’s been lying on my shelf, getting dusty for two years and when I read the first chapter it might have been another ten...

Story and Poem of the Week and Inspiration Point

Posted by Insertponceyfrenchnamehere on Fri, 14 Aug 2020

Posted by Philip Sidney on Fri, 14 Aug 2020 We're having a heatwave - a tropical heatwave and it seems to be doing wonders for your writing if not the garden. Story of the week goes to a wonderfully wry, dry safety warning on modern living - Simon Barget's suitably hot: The Flames, The Flames: https://www.abctales.com/story/simon-barget/flames-flames Poem of the week goes to something more cooling, the gorgeous Departure of Nightjars by...

Story and Poem of the Week and Inspiration Point.

Posted by Philip Sidney on Fri, 14 Aug 2020

We're having a heatwave - a tropical heatwave and it seems to be doing wonders for your writing if not the garden. Story of the week goes to a wonderfully wry, dry safety warning on modern living - Simon Barget's suitably hot: The Flames, The Flames: https://www.abctales.com/story/simon-barget/flames-flames Poem of the week goes to something more cooling, the gorgeous Departure of Nightjars by Onemorething: https://www.abctales.com/story/...

Simon Sebag Montefiore (2007) Young Stalin.

Posted by celticman on Thu, 13 Aug 2020

Young Stalin was winner of the 2007 Costa Biography Award. You can imagine historian Simon Sebag Montefiore after his acclaimed biography, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar , wondering what he would write next. Then hitting on the wheeze, I’ll write the same thing, but younger. It depends what you mean by young, of course. As Montefiore declares workers in the Baku oilfields, died around thirty-years old, on average. Young Stalin is around 39-...

Xan Brooks (2017) The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times.

Posted by celticman on Wed, 12 Aug 2020

Xan Brooks takes as his starting point something grotesque and twists it. Four men, ‘the funny men’ with such grotesque physical and mental injuries after the First World War that they have been marked down as dead, a telegram sent to their nearest and dearest to inform them of this—fake news—while they shelter in a cottage in the grounds of the aristocratic Grantwood House. Four children, three girls and a boy taken in a covered lorry to meet...

The Australian Dream, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, writer Stan Grant, director Daniel Gordon.

Posted by celticman on Mon, 10 Aug 2020

The Australian Dream, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, writer Stan Grant, director Daniel Gordon. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000lpv7/the-australian-dream I’d never heard of Adam Goodes. Let me put this into context he plays Australian Football League. A sport I don’t know the rules, or follow the game. The easy part is telling who Adam Goodes was, by making a comparison with David Beckham. He was the David Beckham of Aussie Rules Football. He...

Andrew James Grieg (2020) Whirligig.

Posted by celticman on Fri, 07 Aug 2020

A whirligig is a spinning top, a small predatory beetle, and a way of describing, for example, coming and goings. I quickly ripped through Andrew James Greig’s short, breakout, novel. Glen Mhor (Inverness) provides a Highland setting for skulduggery in this whodunnit. Four murders and a former top policeman forced to commit suicide, run in tandem with eight children that went missing from a home run by the Sisters of Mercy. Five shallow graves...

Story and Poem of the Week and Inspiration Point

Posted by Insertponceyfrenchnamehere on Fri, 07 Aug 2020

I'm taking a short break from melting in the heat to bring you this week's picks: Big congratulations to onemorething for 'to my imaginary child' which has stayed with me ever since I first read it, and the same to drew_gummerson for his wonderful three parter 'Artur and Guillaume' - and if the words three and parter put you off, don't let them - it's an immersive read which hums along at a snappy pace. Conversely, if the idea of three parts...

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