celticman's blog

The Champions League final is always a disappointment and this was no exception. Much was made of Atletico Madrid losing the final to Bayern Munich, after a reply, forty years ago. Little was said about how they cynically hacked and butchered Celtic’s Quality Street Kids and took turns booting Jimmy Johnstone up in the air at Celtic Park to help qualify for that final. Watch it on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDElMvVdOK4 . That’s...

For me the gold standard of war novels remains All Quiet on the Western Front . We are the first generation not to be involved in a World War (if you exclude global warming, a war we’ve already lost). Klay reminds us the job of soldiers, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is to kill people. He gets inside the character’s heads. That everything in Iraq is fucked up is given. That the infantrymen (and is largely working-class men) doing the fucking up are...

Books I’ve been unable or unwilling to finish recently. This is a big step for me. I used to think I owed the book, the author and the universe the obligation of finishing a book when I started it. Rather like hatching a chick, when the eggs broke you’ve got to watch it grow, even if it’s brain-muddled with only one eye. So here goes, a list of books that are unputdownable, only I did. Tom Rob Smith (2009) Child 44 . I got to page 13 on this one...

The cover of Death and the Penguin has the outline of a penguin in black, one wing is the barrell of a gun and the other a handle, the trigger is superimposed on the white bib of the penguin. It’s ingenious. I was halfway through the book before I noticed. The book is genius. Set in the Ukraine, after the fall of Communism, Viktor Alekseyvich Zolotoroyov is a writer that can only manage to write the occasional short story that no one wants to...

I've shortened Writing Process Blog Tour to (WPBT). No I haven't. I'm tryng to make it longer and more interesting. "As part of the Writing Process Blogging Tour, I've been invited by John Allen - a freelance writer to talk about what my writing process is." Writers always start off by saying it’s hard work. Maybe you’re in the wrong profession. Writing isn’t work. Writing is just messing about with words. The consolation is that most of the...

I watched the movie and it was as scary as a box of melted Maltesers. Part of the reason for that is my fault. I’m old and cynical and nothing much on the telly can scare me as much as looking in the mirror. I thought I’d give the book a chance. After all it inspired a film and an extended run on stage as a play. Nineteen years one of the blurbs on the book tells the reader. Wow. The book must be really good. It’s only 160 pages (including...

This is the best thing that has been on the telly for a long time. The first episode begun with an impromptu party in Hitler’s Germany of 1941. Five friends celebrating life and agreeing to meet up at the same time every year. Wilhelm Winter (Volker Bruch), a Wehrmacht officer posted to the Russian front, provides some of the voice overs. He’s the natural leader of the group. His brother Friedhelm (Tom Schilling) is the more sensitive or the two...

I’ve spent a lot of time with these babies. All of the women writers who are featured - and there are ten of them here - have been story or poem of the week on ABCtales a couple of times. There are other women writers that are not featured. It’s a difficult one. We’ve all got our own preferences, whether it’s prose or poetry. Maggy van Eijk, for example, is a strange beast. ‘This is the part where a Dutch girl/ loses herself in smoke only/to...

Frances Murdoch died two days ago. You don’t know her. She wasn’t a celebrity, born in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression. She would have been too young to know anything about depression and she was always a cheery soul. She would become a teenager during the Second World War. Postwar-prosperity, full employment and the creation of the Welfare State would mark the beginnings of her working life. I don’t know what she worked as, or what...

Here Elena describes her mother: ‘Born three years before Russia turned into the Soviet Union, my mother became the mirror image of my motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave…A survivor of the famine, Stalin’s terror and the Great Patriotic War…’. Food features heavily in the account. They have a Dacha thirty miles from Leningrad. A property owner in a property-less state with no such thing as privacy. Her father had a chauffeur...