Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel about a magical underground railroad that took slaves from the South not to safety, but not to slavery either. Harlem Shuffle has no such tropes. Ray Carney is trying to get by selling furniture on 125 th Street. 1959, America is on the up and up. Not that you’d know if you were a black man. He needs to walk the line of being crooked enough to be straight. Everyone is on the take from the cop...

Roddy Doyle makes you smile. You just need to think of that line from The Commitments , ‘We are the black men of…’ whatever it was. I’m never very good at remembering. He wrote about the housing crisis in Dublin. Rosie ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p09lk76z/rosie ). How letting the market sort things out is darkest doublethink, whilst helping take a hammer to poor people’s lives. What I’m building up to saying is aye, Roddy Doyle, but...

As per usual, the stream of good material flows ever on. It cheers me up no end to know that – every day – there is something to read that is brilliant, beguiling, or brave,. Sometimes a piece is all three. Story of the W eek was a tough choice again this week. Rosalie Kempthorne produced several of her off-kilter, disturbing, yet believable pieces. Part one of the first of them is here Jack O’ Donnell (Celticman’s) fishermen’s tale ‘The Ten...

Not Writing : Read, that’s all. The more you read the better your writing will be. Read a (very) few books generally acknowledged to be bad writing. Work out why people say this about them. Read the books your parents and grandparents had to read at school and books by their writers’ contemporaries. (You may be offended, that’s fine. Learn to read with detachment, it’s a good skill to have). Make notes about what you read, or what has inspired...

Oscar Wilde: ‘Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has ever read history, is a man’s original value.’ A writer’s job is to remember. The better the writer, the better we remember. I’d a day out at The Golden Friendship Club on Saturday. Jim McLaren performed two miracles—and perhaps there’ll be a play about that one day—buying the old Masonic Club and finding the money to renovate it. If he wants to hang a picture of his mum, Agnes, and...

Again this week we've had marvellous work on the site, some writers tackling head on the heartbreaking events of the last couple of weeks, others giving us some uplifting respite from the grim news. Poem of the Week is socialeaf's beautiful 'Then to Spring', which manages to do both, with its wonderful description of spring breaking through and its image of desperate escape from the thing 'raking at our backs'. A remarkable piece of work. Then...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00156cw/storyville-tango-with-putin?page=1 Memory is always being subverted. Tango with Putin begins with the Muscovite fairy-tale princess and her pink car looking for a prince. Natasha and Sasha…and they lived happily ever after in their castle. James Cameron (reporting on the North Vietnamese): ‘They whispered that I was their dupe, but what they really meant was I was not their dupe.’ The princess wants...

Storyville, Final Account, BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, Director Luke Holland https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0013vf3/storyville-final-account The simplest path is that of force. The crooked path is that of rhetoric and ideology. I ask myself a question here: Could I have done this. Could I have massacred men, women and children? My sympathy is not with the Nazis, but the victims of Neo-Nazism. My answer is Yes. Like 99% of other Germans I’d have...

Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist, author and critic of Vladimir Putin was murdered in her apartment in central Moscow 7 th October 2006. Ryszard Kapuscinski. Imperium : ‘All dictators, regardless of epoch or country have one common trail: they know everything, are experts on everything.’ Chechnya: A Dirty War 4 th November 1999. ‘You probably think I’m writing this to stir your pity. My fellow citizens have indeed proved a heard-hearted...

I spy...