celticman's blog

Here’s the remit. Denise Mina was commissioned to write about Mary Queen of Scots through a contemporary fictional lens. A very short novel in which the major characters of the Scottish aristocracy appear in a plot against the Crown. She focused on the murder of David Rizzio aged 33, at Holyrood, on Saturday the 9 th March 1566. Rizzio came from an area we now call Italy. A commoner that could speak four languages and acted as the Queen’s...

I’d read (and reviewed) Billy Moore’s A Prayer Before Dying . He tells the reader how Prisoner ‘Moore A7853AP’ is getting released from Wandsworth Prison. He’s finished his time after getting deported from the Thailand prison system. Free but not really free. Like over 70% of other prisoners he’s soon back to doing what he was doing. The UK prison system is a costly mess. But Moore is one of the lucky few. For starters, he can read. His book, A...

My expectations of this film were so low I was ready to switch off before I watched the first frame. But they flipped stereotypes by blowing something up, and commenting on expectations. I was sucked right in. An absolute raging ragtag delight. The best film since Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments , which was set on the other side of the Irish border. The music in The Commitments was classified as soul. The kind of music an old guy, like me, would...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002385t/parole-series-2-1-trust-no-one https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002385w/parole-series-2-2-can-leopards-change-their-spots https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002385z/parole-series-2-3-no-smoke-without-fire https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0023860/parole-series-2-4-the-gravest-of-mistakes Jimmy Boyle claimed he’d no special skills other than ‘being good at violence’. I’m friendly...

Sir Alex, BBC 1, BBC iPlayer, Director Jason Ferguson, Narrators, Sir Alex Ferguson and Jason Ferguson. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m0026jq0/sir-alex?seriesId=m0026jpz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Ferguson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Alex_Ferguson:_Never_Give_In A hagiography of the longest serving and most successful manager of Manchester United. And the most successful manager of Aberdeen and of British football—by...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict_in_2024 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd0ep0j83p7o Nathan Thrall’s account of a traffic accident where a bus flipped and six kindergarten children and a teacher escorting them were burnt to death and others injured was the winner of The Pulitzer Prize. It focuses on the life of one parent, Abed Salama, mirroring A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by...

I ripped through The Cloisters . Katy Hays’s Sunday Times bestseller is one of those poor-little-rich-girl books where you don’t really need to think. That’s a begrudged compliment. It’s one of those books I don’t really think I should like, which is a way of saying I’m better than that (when, in fact, I’m lying, which you would expect). The heroine is Ann Stilwell. Her goal is to escape Walla Walla, which was the spiritual home of Walt Whitman...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Rob_a_Bank_%282024_film%29?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.netflix.com/title/81254312 My eldest brother Stephen (SEV to his mates) was a bank robber. No, he wasn’t really. But he got arrested for attempting to rob the two banks in Clydebank Shopping Centre about 40 years ago. The police forensics swabbed his hair and declared there were traces of it in the backseat stockings. That showed that he’d pulled...

Luckenbooth in Edinburgh dialect means Lockedbooth, the kind stall holders carted about to sell goods. Jenni Fagan whittles down her writing to what is true. She’s full of surprises. So when the devil’s daughter rows away from a Scottish island in a coffin made by her father and ends up in Leith docks, it’s no bigger surprise than Mary Anne McLeod leaving Tong, marrying Fred Trump and fathering the devil’s child Donald. The structure of the book...

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store was Barrack Obama’s Pick for Book of the Year. You’d expect that. Much of the book is set in the years of the Great Depression, 1936. At the very bottom of the heap were the black man and woman. Standing beside them, but slightly above them were the immigrant whites, the Jews, whom the world could burn for all they cared. Top of the heap of Chicken Hill, Pennsylvania those with some education like Doc Roberts...