"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by Charles Brandt (Steerforth Press 2004)

"I spent the war as a rifleman in Europe in the Thunderbird Division—the 45th Infantry Division. They say the average number of days of actual combat for a veteran is around eighty. By the time the war was over the Army told me I had 411 combat days, which entitled me to $20 extra pay a month. I was one of the lucky ones. The real heroes, some of them with only one combat day, are still over there. As big a target as I was and as many fire fights as I was in, I never got hit by a German bullet or shrapnel. I said a lot of foxhole prayers, especially pinned down in a dugout in Anzio. And whatever anybody wants to say about my childhood, one thing my childhood did teach me was how to take care of myself, how to survive.”

Fever Pitch (2005)

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)

In Bruges (2008)

Goldstone (2016)

Ruth and Martin's Album Club by Martin Fitzgerald (Unbound 2017)

So, over to you Peter. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?????

What’s wrong with me is a puritanical desire to be serious, and an actual inability to take popular music seriously. I pretty much gave up listening to pop music round about the time Radio London (Big L, 266 on the medium wave band, not the BBC one) went off the air in 1967, and absolutely gave up soon after I crashed my motorbike in the late summer of 1969, an event that strengthened my wish to be serious.

I’d been listening to Tin Pan Alley, I can now work out, since about 1963 (Pick of the Pops on Sunday afternoons was eventually permitted by my boarding school headmaster who until then had insisted nobody could listen to the radio unless he could make his own set, which a couple of my schoolfellows did, so subverting the ban). So I was in on the beginning of it, and it was all catchy, memorable singles which quickly came and quickly went, and the waters closed over them. I don’t think anyone ever expected to hear them again once they’d dropped off the charts, and it was amazing how quickly singles vanished from the shops once they had stopped selling.

As a result, they’re great memory-joggers, instantly taking me back to certain long-ago moments. But most of them are pretty artless. I never thought it was anything more than an ephemeral pleasure, and I still don’t, though one or two singles, e.g. ‘We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place’ and ‘Meet on the Ledge’, appealed to my gloomy instincts more than the rest.

The Death of Stalin (2017)

A former book reader writes . . .

. . . I'll just leave this here.

Nothing like setting yourself up for a fall.

Field of Dreams (1989)

The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War by David Lebedoff (Random House 2008)

On that same balmy night in June of 1930, while Waugh was amusing the duchess, a young man of the same age but very different appearance, Eric Blair, was working alone in a small, shabby room in the working-class section of Leeds, a manufacturing city in the north. He was the unwelcome guest of his brother-in-law, who regarded this lodger as a penniless failure with no job and no future.

This opinion was shared by almost everyone acquainted with Blair. It was a relatively small group but one that included several experts on failure; they had learned about it firsthand. Blair looked, and often smelled, like a tramp, because he was one. He, however, made the distinction that he wasn’t really a tramp, but only chose to be among tramps to free himself from class prejudices about poverty and dirt. He put it this way: “When you have shared a bed with a tramp and drunk tea out of the same snuff-tin, you feel that you have seen the worst and the worst has no terrors for you.