celticman's blog

Biographer and fellow Oxford graduate A.N. Wilson looks at the man behind The Narnia Chronicles. He follows Lewis’s path from a public school boy that couldn’t hold a bat or kick a ball and was thus doomed to failure to a brilliant scholar, privately tutored, that got a double first (Greek and Latin and the Greats) and almost as an afterthought English. English being treated not very seriously at Oxford, the kind of subject a second-rate kind of...

Capitulation. A long season with nothing much to look forward to. Kaka was easily the best player on the park. The first goal, however, was not a thing of beauty. Celtic are a big physically strong team. Fraser Foster, the goalkeeper, is six-foot-seven. The last keeper that height played for Rangers, Peter McCloy, ‘the Girvan lighthouse’. There was little point playing the ball at anything over head height into the box or he would just catch it...

Dark chatter is what was left after the cosmic big bang. Or dark chatter was what we heard after the banker’s big bang and banks imploded suckering most of us in. Use whatever index you like, make your own lens and look through it. If it is true you’ll consistently find the rich get richer and are rocketing away from the poor with increasing velocity. Focus in on the French city of Angers. Angers showed that mobilisation is possible for those...

The preface on the front cover says ‘My incredible story of survival during the war in the Far East’. In simple sentences the narrative follows the journey of a teenage boy, lucky to have a job during the hungry Thirties, working in a warehouse in Aberdeen. He’s twenty when he’s one of the first drafts of men joining the Gordon Highlanders during The Second World War. His innate fitness and ability also means after basic training he’s also one...

The Troubles. 1972. The IRA set off 1800 bombs in Belfast that year. They set up roadblocks to protect Catholics from the tit-for-tat drive-by shootings from Loyalists. The British Government or British Army decided to introduce the counter-insurgency tactics used in Kenya by Brigadiers with hyphenated names. But this was closer to home and it wasn’t blacks that were being shot, albeit it was working class Catholics. Hard working fathers like...

As Graham Greene famously said: ‘There’s always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.' This the seed crop of Munro’s stories. It shows her father’s, fathers’ father, a cousin of James Hogg, leaving the Ettrick Valley in Scotland for the wilds of America, which was really Canada. A good author draws you in and puts you on the boat with them. I was all for leaving the Laidlaw family on the boat, but I persevered until...

I’ve not enjoyed a film as much for a long time. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) plays the kind of man I should hate. His job is to roam, first class, of course, over the United States firing employees for bosses to chicken to do so themselves. It’s a growth industry. Some of the early scenes were based on transcripts of former employees’ real life experiences. I’m sure men in employed in such an industry are not as suave as Ryan/George (or myself...

I thought I’d read this before, my memories pickled. Maybe I just lived it. My brother was an alcoholic. Dead. His pal’s Jas, Tommy, Billy. Dead. Dead. Dead. There’s more casualties. Drinks a funny thing. It builds you up and knocks you down. Healy knows that better than anyone. Violence is always a background hum. His Da tried to beat him into submission. The army tried to beat him into submission. The police lifted him and a regular beating...

I had heard of the Nobel Prize, but hadn’t heard of Alice Munro, sometimes these two things meet with a bang (oh dear). Each short story in the collections are long enough, or short enough, dependent on your mood, to read in one sitting. They are the ideal length. Time often opens out, between one paragraph and another, into ten, fifteen, thirty or forty years. In ‘Train’ for example Jackson scrapes his leg when jumping from a train, the next...

The Disappeared, as the name suggests, were those taken from their homes by the IRA in Northern Ireland during the troubles and their bodies hidden in bogs and ditches in unmarked graves, often in the Republic of Ireland. The most poignant of these was thirty-seven-year old Jean McConville. Her husband had died of cancer. She was a widow and mother of ten children aged between six and sixteen when the paramilitaries came for her in 1972 in the...