celticman's blog

Jan, the narrator, is aged eight in 1913 when this memoir begins. It takes the reader through the First World War and into the mass unemployment of the 1920s and finishes with his eventual marriage to a childhood sweetheart. It’s a slim volume and can be read in one sitting, as I did. In simple sentences it explains what it was like to part of the working poor and living through a period of social change. The book begins with a set-to and make-...

Most of in the Aktions took place in the Wild East of Ukraine, Poland and the Ukraine and were perpetrated by men. Lower looks at women’s role in the genocidial killing of undesireables. Over half a million women were sent to these new lands as nurses, teachers, secretaries and wives. Most suffered the collective amnesia of that time. Most followed orders. Case studies of women who administered lethal injections, gassed and starved the sick, the...

70% of British television producers, polled in 2006, at the Edinburgh Television Festival thought that Little Britain ’s Vicky Pollard was an accurate reflection of working- class youth. This was the shocking statistic that helped to introduce the Radio Times Huw Weldon Memorial Lecture in 2013. There’s no need to re-iterate that shows such as Jeremy Kyle, Skint and Shameless helped shape the political narrative of withdrawing from the welfare...

I watched this on BBC iPlayer. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01k3ccx This Happy Land is a play on words. The allusion is to Shakespeare’s Richard II, Act II, Scene I and John of Gaunt’s great patriotic speech, ‘Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings’. Then again it may simply be an allusion to a specific pit village in Boness called,...

The librarian looked at me when I checked this book out. I’m used to this, being very handsome, a bit like a young Sean Connery only older and balder and a bit more in the beef stakes. But the librarian was a man. I’ve nothing against that kind of thing. These barriers are breaking down. If a librarian wants to be a man and wants to gawk at me and manhandle my choice of book then that’s his perogative. He looked as if he wanted to say something...

You’ve got to watch Derren Brown. He’s so good as what he does that when he tells Ivan Massow that he will steal a painting worth £100 000 from a pop-up art exhibition he’s organising, tell him the day when he’s going to do it, the time he’s going to do it -3pm- and gives the art dealer a picture of the person that’s going to steal it for him, then you expect him to be able to do it. He bets Massow a nominal £1 that he will and lets him organise...

The first Inspecting Captain of Submarine Boats, as they were called, was advised never to go near them by the Director of Naval Construction, Sir William White, as he had once descended in a submergable boat in a London dock in 1887 and had been stuck on the bottom for an hour or so. Three American type ‘Holland’ submarine boats were built in Barrow in Furness in 1901. They were sixty-three feet long and were shaped—in a way associated with...

Lily Bere is determined to kill herself. Her beloved grandson Bill, a Gulf War veteran is dead and her life seems blighted, but as an eighty-nine-year old woman she can hardly muster the energy to commit herself to that final act. Her life has been full of loss and betrayal. She takes us back to the tranquil times before the Eastern Uprising when her dad had risen to chief superintentant of Division B, one of the top police officers in Dublin...

Let me begin with a confession, whenever Celtic are playing Barcelona, whether home or away, and some ‘neutral’ asks me what the score will be I always say Barcelona will win 3-0. I assume that Barcelona are at least three times better than Celtic. Yet I stuck a couple of quid on Georgios Samaras to score first and Celtic to win 1-0 (200/1). For that to happen the footballing universe must turn slightly the wrong way and our goalie must have the...

This is Munro’s first book, a collection of fifteen short stories, won her Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s award and put her name on the literary map. The literary ghosts of rural Canada and later characterisations are here. Her father is here in shadow form, unable to make a living despite working 365 days a year, seven days a week, farming furs like minx and fox, penned up in small cities with their own walkways. Her mother is here ‘...