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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https://www.channel4.com/programmes/nomadland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomadland https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/02/nomadland-living-in-cars-working-amazon ‘I’m not homeless, I’m houseless,’ Fern (Frances McDormand) corrects a young girl she’d tutored after a chance meeting in a superstore, who’d heard she was homeless. In other words, Fern had gone from being one of us to one of them. A person to be feared and derided. ‘...

I read all of Carl MacDougall’s books apart from his short-story collection Elvis is Dead . Reading is what I do. But I had ulterior motives. I was sponsored by Scottish Book Trust and mentored by Carl MacDougall for an unpublished novel The Cruelty Man 2018, which belatedly is being published by Spellbound Books as Beastie in 2024. I wanted to meet the man on the page before meeting the actual man. I knew far more about him than he knew about...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Friend A feel-good movie where everybody knows the star is going to die isn’t a good premise for a movie unless it involves Jesus Christ. In the Saviour’s case, there’s always a chance of a follow up with Resurrection 2. Based on a true story, but where everybody is pretty and glittery as a disco ball. Actress, Nicole Teague (Dakota Johnson) has terminal cancer in 2013. She lives in Fairhope Alabama. She tells...