On page 402, towards the end of this second volume of the rise and rise of Lyndon Johnson, Robert A.Caro offers an insight into the former President’s personality. 'For a President to preserve as a personal memento a photograph showing the notorious Box 13 in the possession of his political allies—a photograph which by implication provides that someone was indeed in a positon to stuff it—is startling in itself. For him to display the photograph...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0535lq5/billy-connolly-portrait-of-a-lifetime Billy Connolly might well be Scotland’s greatest export after whisky. Both ITV and BBC are competing to squeeze the last dregs of life out of The Big Yin. I’ve checked, he’s not dead yet. But he does have motor- neurone disease and he’s coming up for seventy-five. He said it himself, other people’s success tend to form an inverted U-shaped curve. His success is...

January has certainly felt a lot less bleak with all the brilliant stuff currently being posted on ABC Tales. Lots of splendid writing to enjoy, which makes it even harder to make the week's choices. Story of the Week goes to the first chapter of Talo Segura's series about Milo. I was instantly drawn into the story and completely absorbed by the setting and the characters. Please do go on and read the other parts as well. You definitely won't be...

Exposed: The Church’s Darkest Secret, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, Director Ben Steele. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000dbq7/exposed-the-churchs-darkest-secret-series-1-episode-1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000dbjd/exposed-the-churchs-darkest-secret-series-1-episode-2 But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000dbcf/louis-theroux-selling-sex Louis Theroux is repeating himself. He’s done this before, tackling the sex industry, but now he’s looking the British model. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, in a Carry On kinda way. Sex sells even if it’s documentary sex and Theroux has pretty much a free hand with the BBC who buy any old muck he wants to sell. Selling sex is legal in Britain as long as it doesn’t involve...

I’m a bit stupid. I wasn’t sure if this was fact of fiction or fictionalised fact. I’m still not sure. This short book had me thinking, which is often a good thing. But I don’t really get it, which is a bad thing – right? I’ve been to a few funerals this year and I wrote in memorial that ‘Grief was too small a word’. Setting the tone in Max Porter’s book, split into three short chapters –beginning, middle and end—is not so much a prologue as an...

I read with sadness this morning that Neil Peart, drummer and lyricist of RUSH has died. He was 67. He and his bandmates, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson were a soundtrack and voice to my teenage years. Peart was a hugely accomplished drummer and undertook writing the band's lyrics when no-one else wanted to and drove the band's direction. For anyone who grew up in Ireland or the UK in the 1980's, the time was bleak, the weather seemed bleak, the...

“For there’s no-one with endurance like the man who sells insurance.” (Crumit / Curtis 1935) Or the modern author too. Eighty-five years after this song was composed and the start of a new decade, it’s all about endurance, persistence, self-belief and hard graft. I have just published my seventh novel: Eagles Hunt Wolves . It is the fifth and final part of a wartime series I started in 2006, beginning with Get Lenin which was published in 2011...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000d27r/storyville-jonestown-terror-in-the-jungle-episode-1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000d28j/storyville-jonestown-terror-in-the-jungle-episode-2 Most news stories start their pitch with the headline and in an inverted triangular shape begins to tell the rest of the story in terms of cause and effect. I’ll modify this a little here. Jim Jones was born in rural Indiana at the height of the...

History doesn’t run in straight lines. Robert A. Caro has focussed on a fixed point to talk about power. What it is? How it comes about. Who wields it? And how do they use that power? And in his biography of Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), in this first of four volumes, we follow not only the tale of LBJ, who becomes 36 th President of the United States, but the story of the United States, a modern history. Novels begin with flawed characters that need...