Blogs

Over 100 days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Already the West has grown weary of fuel and wheat shortages and high prices. The eighth year of war. Russia occupying Crimea and Donbass regions, and almost twenty per cent of Ukraine since then, creating a land border, including access to the Black Sea. Catherine Belton’s prescient book is early and late. The modus operandi is in the title. Ryzard Kapuscinski’s Imperium is instructive how it...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct39t0 is a recent episode of The Inquiry on BBC World Service. It was about why people in China were not allowed to see the latest Spiderman film and what this means for Hollywood. This year China became the biggest market for cinema. This means half a film's takings will come from people watching and buying films there. So Spiderman lost half its potential takings The Inquiry said that Spiderman was banned in...

I did this in the wrong order (if there is such a thing) I watched the film of the book, before reading the book. For J.R.Moehringer, books are holy things. And I know where he lives because I’ve read the book. F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby Egg territory. J.R’s hometown, Manhasset, Long Island. Sigourney Weaver took her stage name from the guest list of Gatsby’s fictional legendary parties, which the whole of New York’s well-heeled...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00184br/my-name-is-leon Anyone that has been paying attention knows a Tory government that continually takes money from the poor and gives it the rich is where we are now. The worst cost-of-lving crisis in decades. More children taken into care by local authorities grows year on year, while central government takes away funds for caring ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/23/the-guardian-...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0012y9d/judy The use of the singular name implies the universal. A rose by any other name is still a rose. Judy Garland arrives in swinging London for a number of sell-out performances in The Talk of the Town in the winter of 1968. Six months later she was dead at the age of 47. Renee Zellweger is Judy, with a long chin, white butterfly masquerade mask of a face with bright red lips. Get the spiky black...

I loved Meg Henderson’s memoir, Finding Peggy, which gave her a reading audience hoping for more, hoping for better. Ask me about the story and I wouldn’t be able to tell you very much. The leading character in The Holy City, Marion McLeod, around which much of the story of Clydebank winds is Finding Peggy feisty I’d tackled The Holy City before, but lost the plot with it and put it down. I picked it up again and put it down. I’m not sure why I...

It as been a while... I planned to take 2022 off from writing completely. A full break. And here's why - sixteen years of writing, going through the mill of pitching, getting published, watching publishers go bust and retrieving my material back for indie platforms non-stop had taken its toll, I needed to hit the pause button. I needed to stop and take stock of why I write, what compels me to rise every morning and start typing words and...

Scotland last played in the World Cup in France, 1998. The qualification campaign wasn’t a matter of life and death. It was just a game of football, which Ukraine won quite comfortably. They play Wales on Sunday to decide who goes to Qatar in November. When there’s no football on Scotland are playing. Lyndon Dykes elbows Stepanenko on the back of the head as they go for a punted high ball, and gets a booking, sums up the first-half. Dykes doesn’...