celticman's blog

In the Sunday Times bestseller, Daniel Finkelstein deals in the mundane and miraculous. He concludes with both. ‘Our family has survived. Love has conquered hate.’ In the battle with Hitler and Stalin, Mum’s victory is over Hitler and the Nazis. Dad’s victory over Stalin and Communism. Surviving, starting a family and thriving, a thumbing of the nose at totalitarianism. Finkelstein’s memoir fits broadly into a type of Holocaust literature which...

Betsy Lerner (2024) Shred Sisters. I read Shred Sisters in about four hours. It follows the rules of novel writing. Betsy Lerner as a writer, editor and agent—she edited and promoted one of my favourite books Autobiography of a Face —knows too well the holes authors fall into. That doesn’t mean she won’t fall into them, because that’s not the way it works. Most of use can’t really see what we write. She knows that too having published a book...

I’ve a copy of Philippa Gregory’s novel, The Other Boleyn Girl . I’ve had it for around five years. Keep meaning to read it. She’s written a stack of books and over 40 novels. These fed into her belief that women are the ghosts of history. She spent ten years researching Normal Women, drawing on archives, letters, and historical records that fed into her ficton. And at around 600 pages she’s re-written history: his-story as her-story. She gives...

The moron’s moron is in Scotland. His mother was born on Harris and was a native Gaelic speaker. Despite his Scottish roots, he’s not popular in Scotland. Ironically, we may have passed peak Trump. His strategy of lying and denying helped make him the man he is and President of the United States. His supporters want release of what is loosely termed the Epstein files. The moron’s moron suggested Joe Biden was implicated. Summary of Quantitative...

A foreword by Jim Al-Khali inform the reader this is the third book in which leading scientist and engineers are interviewed and their responses recorded for Radio 4. Few of us are going to shout at the radio (or its contemporary equivalent) about the origins of our universe but when it comes to viruses and Covid-19, in particular, conspiracy theorist think they know better than the experts here. I always go with whatever Father Ted thinks...

Michael Murpurgo wrote this collection of five short-stories over forty years ago. He requested the reader read them in the order presented. A story within a story, which is quite a neat trick. Murpurgo is most famous for War Horse . Book, stage-play (with an animated cloth horse) and film. I haven’t read it but did watch the film that elevated him into the elite group (less than five percent) of writers that can make a comfortable living from...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002f2ry/saint-omer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Omer_(film) Saint Omer is about infanticide. Not a promising premise for a film. But it won a stack of awards. Writer and director Alice Diop comes from a documentary background. Saint Omer, the film’s title is also a place name. Based on the real-life trial of Fabienne Kabou, who was convicted in 2016 of drowning her 15-month-old daughter in the...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/old-boys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_adaptations_of_Cyrano_de_Bergerac Old Boys isn’t listed in the Wikipedia of film adaptations of Cyrano de Bergerac. I vaguely recall the Gérard Depardieu version. Back in the nineties, the French leading actor was making the jump to Hollywood. That was before he started moaning about taxes and got a special dispensation from another lead man, Putin, which...

C.J.Cooke is a Creative Writing tutor at the University of Glasgow. We’re back to that debate about whether you can teach creative writing? No matter. I read the debut novel of a Creative Writing tutor from the same university a few years back. It was, as you’d expect, proficient but dead on the page. I doubted if she didn’t have a doctorate and credit in the bank of an esteemed University behind her, she wouldn’t have been picked out of the...

Satu Rämö has written a trilogy of books featuring Icelandic police detective Hildur Runarsdottir. Hildur did her police training in Reykjavik, the world’s most Northern capital, population around 200 000, but much prefers the quieter life in her hometown Isafjurour, where she’s a child protection officer but expected to chip in and do everything from traffic control to getting involved in domestics. Hildur is well up for it. She’s described as...