celticman's blog

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 ‘...

Don’t every wipe tears without gloves is in the first shot, of the first scene, of the first episode (this was the second episode) and is a piece of advice given by a senoir nurse to her more junior partner as they tend to a bedridden youth in a Stockholm hospital in the 1980s. Both nurses wear protective masks and boots and are amoured against this new virus HIV that is contagious in a way that people don’t really understand. The contagiant in...

American blue-blood Truman Capote’s factionalised account of the murder, Saturday, 14th November 1959, of forty-eight year old William Clutter, his wife ‘poor’ Bonnie (nee Fox) who had ‘little spells of melancholia’ three years younger than him and two of his teenage children who lived at home with them, the teenagers Nancy, who was pretty and popular and Kenyon who was more reserved, was a blueprint for later works such as Norman Mailer’s The...

‘When I speak of Tories,’ Bevan said, addressing the Durham Miner’s Gala in July 1948, ‘I mean the small body of people who, whenever they have the chance, have manipulated the political influence of the country for the benefit of the priveledged few. I am [son of a Welsh miner] prepared to forgive and forget the wrongs done to me. I am not prepared to forgive and forget the wrongs done to my people.' Labour's response was the creation of the...

It’s been over thirty years since I’ve read this book. And it’s over a 100 years, two world wars, the Holocaust, use of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, countless other wars, great depressions (including this one) since the working conditions that Tressell descibes so well have receded into the past. When I first read this book I remember feeling angry and somewhat excited that somebody understood that life didn’t have to be that way. Now I’m more...

First things first this has the look and feel of a poetry book. By that I mean it does that old enjambment trick lines skittering across the page and jutting out at unnatural angles. Has it got a natural metre, de Dum, de Dum, de Dum? I don’t really know. My mind lacks that weighty balance. I treat it with discourtesy like a comic book without pictures I can snaffle down in one go. ‘Floating’, for example, begins, ‘Willian is at the swimming...

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...