Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning author of Empire of Pain . Before I read his book I hadn’t heard of the billionaire Sackler family and how they created an opioid addiction factory (Purdue Pharmacy) that killed tens of thousands and made them obscenely wealthy. I had, however, heard of the moron’s moron and former President Donald J.Trump. I’m a Trump watcher. It baffles me that 74 million Americans voted for him in 2020. And it...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/petite-maman/on-demand/74620-001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_Maman Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady blindsided me. It was one of those films where you hold your breath because it’s pretty much perfect. I hoped Petite Maman would be a similar experience. It wasn’t. Petite Maman aligns with the film’s theme. It involves a young girl exploring her mother’s past and forming connections across different...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B0885DCCF8/ref=atv_hm_hom_c_OI67r7_20_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_to_Be_Normal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Tennant Mad to Be Normal is great fun. David Tennant plays gallus as fuck, Scottish, psychiatrist, R.D.Laing. Familiar territory for Tennant. His first major TV role was Campbell Bain in the BBC Scotland drama series Takin' Over the Asylum (1994). Here he’s got a promotion to a...

Before I read this book, I thought like Erik Larson there was a direct line between the sinking of the Lusitania and the United States joining the war on the side of the Allies, much the same as happened at Pearl Harbour. But the Lusitania was sunk by German U-20 7 th May 1915. But the United States maintained a policy of neutrality despite German U-Boats sinking tens of thousands of tons of shipping and killing American citizens until the...

Seasons change and days speed by; I can not believe it’s 2024. I look at the year on the calendar and I’m flabbergasted and, probably like everyone, wonder when the years had flown by? I can easily remember being about fourteen and sitting on the stoop with friends, sitting on one of our house’s stoops was how we ‘hung out together’, and we were calculating our ages in the year 2000. We laughed hysterically thinking how old we’d be (by teenage...

If not now, when? To borrow Shane Horgan’s comment on the Ireland v NZ All-blacks quarter final match in the Rugby World Cup 23 (and with a nod to Primo Levi), If not now, when? Is the constant thought of an indie author. When? MALIGN INTENT is my tenth novel and the follow up to A Kind of Drowning , a second crime thriller featuring Garda Inspector P. J. Crowe. MALIGN INTENT will be released on Amazon KDP on January 27th 2024. It has taken two...

Saltburn wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Upstairs Downstairs, Brideshead Revisited, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Murder on the Dance Floor can go and take a good fuck to themselves as far as I’m concerned. What did you think? Notes. It’s a bit of a mishmash. Plot (2008 Film) for example follows Charles Ryder's relationship with the Flyte family, particularly his close friendship with the charismatic but troubled Sebastian Flyte, and the...

Does anyone know how you can move a story from one set to another?

I’m going to read John Valliant’s latest book, Fireweather an account of how we’re destroying our planet. Before going forward, I looked backward to Valliant’s account of how an Amur tiger, sometimes known as a Siberian tiger, killed and ate a hunter Dmitri Markov in the Primorye territory in Russia’s Far East, near the Chinese border were temperatures plummeted to 40-below zero Centigrade during the winter of December 1997. Few or any of us...

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