Flora and Son (2023) written and directed by John Carney. I’m not a great man for musicals. I’ll stretch to The Commitments . But recently I watched Kneecap . Like Flora and So n set in contemporary Dublin. The film was great. The music was shite. Like Flora, like son. Bertolt Brecht’s frequently quoted Motto comes to mind. It offers an excuse to seem vaguely knowledgeable, while being the opposite. In the dark time Will there also be singing?...

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is a page turner. It has been printed multiple times. On the cover it reminds readers that seven million copies have been sold worldwide. Simon May described Joel Dicker’s novel as his ‘book of the year’. The Truth About Harry Quebert is a book within a book. Harry Quebert mentors Marcus Goldman a younger writer. He gives him the inside slant of how to become a multimillion bestseller like him. All good...

You know what to expect with a Tom Hanks film. You expect Tom Hanks. So if you’ve got 37 merchant and troop ships crossing the Atlantic, you’ve got a Nazi wolf pack of U-Boats waiting to sink them—sneering over the ship’s intercom, ve have ways of making you sink—and you have a few British ships acting as escorts and a rookie boss (captain) in charge of a Fletcher-class destroyer and overall defence strategy, then we’d expect the U-boats to sink...

Warning: This book contains Tories. People whose sense of entitlement is so extreme they think they own Edinburgh, Scotland, the United Kingdom, Europe, the world, the universe…well, you get the picture. Tories. Hugo Rifkind is the son of Malcolm. Many of you might not know who that is or was. I do. Believe me. I do. It is with great regret that I admit to liking Rabbits . Tommo, the narrator, is a rich man’s Holden Caulfield. He goes to a...

Eighty years ago, today, 27 th January, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz death camp. In the same week as one of a handful of the the richest men in the world, Elon Musk denied giving a Nazi Hitler salute of the inauguration of the 47 th American President, we commemorate the Chinese Year of the Snake and the Holocaust. Mark Hodkinson’s biography isn’t about world leaders, with their Jupiter-sized egos. His story is about an ordinary man,...

Hey everyone, The kindle version of my novel titled Who's Aldo? is available for the bargain price of 99p for a very limited time. The book has won many plaudits in the media. Recently I was featured in the List magazie's Hot100 of Scotland's most influential creatives which was a huge privilege. If you enjoy comedy fiction Who's Aldo? is essential reading. The kindle version can be purchsed here Who's Aldo? eBook : Burnett, Colin: Amazon.co.uk...

I was scrolling through lots of films I didn’t want to watch. CODA didn’t jump out but it was brilliant. One of those movies that leaves you feeling better about yourself. I later learned it won a Bafta for best script and best actor in 2021. CODA stands for Children of Deaf Adults. It’s not something I think about. This is show, rather than tell. Ruby Rossi works on a fishing boat off Gloucester, Massachusetts. Teenage girls don’t usually work...

Write what you know. Jenni Fagan writes about what she knows. You’ll find many of the same characters in her autobiography, Ootlin. A child set up to fail. To follow the path set out for them from cradle to grave. From carers that don’t care. A prison system that is all too familiar for graduates of children’s homes. Jenni’s fictional other, Anais is 15, and she’s been sent to the Panopticon. Her age is crucial. Sixteen, she becomes an adult...

Shit. If you’re like me, and you tell your big sister that she should really move house because it’s going to burn down (she lives in Canada, not LA California) but not to worry too much because her grandkids are toast, because of global warming, then, as Hannah Ritchie shows, you’ll really need to change your apocalyptic-scenario storyline. I’ve got a fall-back position that the moron’s moron Trump will start a war with China. So I’m kinda OK...

Here’s the remit. Denise Mina was commissioned to write about Mary Queen of Scots through a contemporary fictional lens. A very short novel in which the major characters of the Scottish aristocracy appear in a plot against the Crown. She focused on the murder of David Rizzio aged 33, at Holyrood, on Saturday the 9 th March 1566. Rizzio came from an area we now call Italy. A commoner that could speak four languages and acted as the Queen’s...