celticman's blog

I was a strange kid, there was nothing I liked more than The World at War . I even liked the music. There is no greater compliment than this ten-part series was just as good, if not better. Last night’s episode, ‘War Without End’ was another stonker. It started where it left off last time. Four-long years of war and no end in sight. The Germans had been on the offensive. They had broken the trench stalemate on the Western front and gained ground...

Doris Lessing is one of those authors I kept meaning to read. Her father was an officer wounded in the Great War and her mother the nurse that nursed him, rather a romantic ideal, but reality often knocks spots off those kinds of notions. Her great love was killed before she could marry him and he’d lost a leg, well, they had each other. Then they’d a loan from the land bank and a failing farm in Southern Rhodesia. She was upwardly mobile,...

Thatcher’s strategy for dealing with the IRA was shaped by Airy Neave, former British Army officer, barrister and politician. It was a simple solution best summed up in the words of Rev. Ian Paisley: No Surrender to the IRA. Mrs Thatcher’s colleagues suggested she thought of it in terms of Hitler’s march into the Sudentan and as a staunch Unionist she could not allow this. The analogy between Thatcher and Hitler is perhaps a bit too farfetched,...

The title comes from a fragment near the end of the book and relates to swimming and life. Joy, the narrator, is a twenty-seven year old schoolteacher. She teaches drama, but in life she keeps fluffing her lines. She’s not quite sure about anything and, in this her first book, the experienced reader looks for clues to Galloway’s identity. Joy has got an older sister (Mhari) she’s terrified of. So does Galloway. Check. Her mother walked into the...

This is a novel based on the true story by Ruth and Jack Gruener. Inside, the book is dedicated: ‘For Jack who survived’. So it’s a novel that’s not a novel and a memoir that is not a memoir. All memories are ersatz, watery coffee brought to the boil with novelistic techniques. So we open, Chapter One, page two, with equilibrium, a remember of remembering: ‘If I had known what the next six years of my life were going to be like, I would have...

I’ve got Janice Galloway the wrong way round. I’m working backwards from her autobiographical and award winning memoirs to her earlier works. This is a collection of short stories, musings and the setting of a stage play (Scenes from Life No.27: Living In). ‘Fearless’ is my favourite, which is no surprise, I just ate up anything autobiographical and this is from that genre. ‘And he had these terrible specs. Thick as the bottoms of milk bottles,...

I’ve always meant to read this novel. Now I’ve spoiled it and watched the Hammer House of Hokum directed by James Watkins, with the screenplay by Jane Goldman, first. I’ve always liked a bit of Gothic. The name Arthur Kipps immediately makes me think of Pip and John Mills. I suppose we make do with the boyish Daniel Radcliffe as the man that is sent to settle the estate of the late Mrs Alice Drablow. Drablow is a Dickensian sounding name and...

The last of David Hare’s spy trilogy. We have some salt of our youth in us and old Worricker has more than most. Has he enough to bring down the government, to bring down the Prime Minister? Well, let’s start with a little jazz, a little flitting about, a short-stay in Germany. Worricker and Tyrell are lying low. An M15 agent is told by her counterpart the difference between Germany and Britain is ‘Germans don’t like cameras’. They don’t like to...

Anne Michaels’ collections of poetry have won a shedload of international prizes, but as any literary agent knows, there’s no money in poetry. Poets that write prose tend to be good at the small things that make the larger things. This is quite a simple story of love lost and found. Jean loves Avery. Avery loves Jean. They have a baby, but it’s stillborn. They drift apart. Jean has this thing with Lucjan. He’s Polish an orphan from the Warsaw...

There’s too much football on TV. In my day it used to be highlights of Archie McPherson’s blow-away hair and sometimes Arthur Montford on a Sunday. Then we had Football Italia. Now we’ve got every game in the world all showing at the same time and billed as the biggest the best and the most important. Tickets for this match were selling for 800 Euros. John Terry, former England captain, we were told was in the stadium. I like Barcelona because...