Recommendations:

Ruth

Cove and Kilcreggan Book Festival 2024

Amongst the popular authors this year are Liz Lochhead, Alex Gray, and a much lauded new kid on the block called Jen Stout, who has been recalling her adventures covering the conflict in Ukraine.

Tickets, both weekend and single event are available via the button below.

Breaking News !

We are pleased to announce our full list of Authors.

Saturday 23rd November

• Liz Lochhead
• Alex Gray
• Aasmah Mir
• Josie Long

Sunday 24th November

• Ken McNab
• Jen Stout
• Gavin Francis
• Peter Ross

More details on the authors can be found here

Tickets for the Individual Author Sessions are now available at the link below at £8 per session.

Weekend Passes at £55 each are still on sale and offer a £9 saving on individual tickets.

You will receive a ticket by email in the form of a PDF attachment which can be printed out or presented on your phone at the event. As soon as your payment is processed your name will be added to our list which will be available at the Cove Burgh Hall door. 

Cove Burgh Hall, Shore Road, Cove, G84 0LY.

Shetland - BBC

The dark side of one of the most beautiful places on earth. Uncovering secrets and lies from the past - detective drama starring Douglas Henshall, Ashley Jensen and Alison O'Donnell.

A Glasgow Girl: A memoir of growing up and finding your voice - Aasmah Mir

A Glasgow Girl is the coming of age story of Aasmah Mir's childhood growing up in 1970s Glasgow. From a vivacious child to a teenage loner, Aasmah candidly shares the highs and lows of growing up between two cultures - trying to fit in at school and retreating to the safe haven of a home inhabited by her precious but distant little brother and Helen, her family's Glaswegian guardian angel.

Intricately woven into this moving memoir is the story of Aasmah's mother, as we follow her own life as a young girl in 1950s Pakistan to 1960s Scotland and beyond. Both mother and daughter fight, are defeated and triumph in different battles in this sharp and moving story. A Glasgow Girl is a remarkable memoir about family, identity and finding yourself where you are.

Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church - Peter Ross

A thoroughly beguiling tour around the manifold riches of Britain's churches, Ross' immersive book ranges from unassuming parish to mighty cathedral and tells a defiantly human story of art, architecture, history and culture.

David:

Rebels and Renegades: Sheila Rock

Street Level Photoworks are pleased to present REBELS & RENEGADES, a two part exhibition featuring the outstanding work of Sheila Rock and Jill Furmanovsky, two pioneering women photographers who captured the zeitgeist of punk and the post-punk unfolding in music and style.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/ - Why Dutch support for Israel's football hooligans has roots in colonial racism

Eamonn

My Salinger Year - film

In New York City's late nineties, a young aspiring writer lands a day-job at J.D. Salinger's literary agency. While her eccentric and old-fashioned boss tasks her to process Salinger's voluminous fan mail, she struggles to find her own voice.

SALINGER- Documentary

Features interviews with 150 subjects - including Salinger's friends and colleagues who have never spoken on the record - as well as film footage, photographs, and other material never before seen.

A bit of a U.S. Election Special here. As we all wonder what the next 4 years of President Trump will bring, here is this week's episode with this trio on good form.

Recommendations:

Eamonn

The Kominsky Method - Netflix

Acting coach Sandy Kominsky and best friend Norman Newlander keep each other laughing as they navigate the ups and downs of getting older.

The War Room - Amazon

This documentary follows President Clinton's campaign trail and focuses on his aides, James Carville and George Stephanopoulos.

Paddy

https://theonion.com/ - America's Finest News Source..

Ludwig - BBC iplayer

David

Gideon's Spies: The Inside Story of Israel's Legendary Secret Service The Mossad (Paperback)

Gordon Thomas has a grasp of history… this is one of the few books to have captured the true nature of the Israeli Government and the thorough process of the Israeli power elite. Ari Ben-Menashe, Former Adviser on Intelligence to the Israeli Government Created in 1951 to ensure an embattled Israel’ s future, the Mossad has been responsible for the most audacious and thrilling feats of espionage, counterterrorism and assassination ever ventured. Gideon’ s Spies has been created from closed-door interviews with Mossad agents, informants and spymasters, and drawing from classified documentsand top-secret sources, revealing previously untold truths about the Israeli intelligence agency.

Bang-up-to-date, this new paperback edition of this best-selling book includes startling new information on subjects ranging from Weapons of Mass Destruction, international terrorism, North Korea’ s bird-flu war games and ‘ ethnic bombs’ . The riveting text is supported by glossaries, appendices and shows a Mossad as it has historically been: brilliant, ruthless, flawed but ultimately fascinating. 

David Pratt: What I learned from the US election result - The National

We are very lucky to have the participation of all our guests who give up their time to chat through the week's topics. Today we are ally pleased to welcome back Alison and Catriona.

Recommendations:

Alison

Why We're Polarized (Paperback) - Ezra Klein

America's political system isn't broken. The truth is scarier: it's working exactly as designed.

In Why We're Polarized, Ezra Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America's deep political divisions, revealing how a system filled with rational, functional parts can combine into a dysfunctional whole.

Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump's rise to the Democratic Party's leftward shift to the politicisation of everyday culture.

Klein shows how and why American politics polarised in the twentieth century, what that polarisation did to Americans' views of the world and one another, and how feedback loops between polarised political identities and polarised political institutions drive the system toward crisis. This revelatory book will change how you look at politics, and perhaps at yourself.

Catriona

The Londoner

The Bell - link to Catriona's article on Easdale Bros.

Eamonn

"What's the secret to still dancing at 106?"

Recommendations:

Angela

The Wild Robt - film

From DreamWorks Animation comes a new adaptation of a literary sensation, Peter Brown's beloved, award-winning, #1 New York Times bestseller, The Wild Robot. The epic adventure follows the journey of a robot--ROZZUM unit 7134, "Roz" for short--that is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and must learn to adapt to the harsh surroundings, gradually building relationships with the animals on the island and becoming the adoptive parent of an orphaned gosling.

David

Searching For Gerda Taro - film

SEARCHING FOR GERDA TARO celebrates the life and work of Taro — a charismatic Jewish refugee from Germany, an anti-fascist, and a trailblazing photographer whose work would be forgotten for decades.

In 1935, Taro (then going by her birth name, Gerta Pohorylle), met Endre Friedmann, a Jewish photographer from Hungary trying to make a name for himself in Paris. They fell in love and moved in together. The next year, they changed their names to Gerda Taro and Robert Capa. Capa taught Taro photography. Taro in turn helped sell his photos and build his reputation. Together, they went to Spain to report on the civil war from the front lines. She captured the heroism of Republican fighters and documented the world’s first deaths of civilians from aerial bombardment.

SEARCHING FOR GERDA TARO shares dozens of stunning archival images by and of Taro. We come to understand her life and work through conversations with curators, authors, and descendants of those who knew her. For decades, her legacy was wrapped up with Capa’s, many of her photos seemingly lost. But with the discovery of thousands of her negatives in the mid-1990s, Taro can finally enjoy the credit she deserves as a brilliant photographer in her own right.

Eamonn

Absolutely Fabulous: Inside Out - Doc

Celebrate one of Britain's most-loved comic creations as

Jennifer Saunders, Dame Joanna Lumley, Julia Sawalha and

Jane Horrocks reunite to share anecdotes and backstage

secrets.

Episode 244 of Talk Media discusses the media coverage following the sudden death of Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond, who in 2014, took our country within touching distance of Independence.

Eamonn, joined by Catriona Stewart and David Pratt, have a frank discussion on the media coverage , a look at the horrors taking place in the Middle East and the frankly strange news of Labour pushing weight loss drugs in an attempt to cut back the welfare bill.

Recommendations:

Eamonn

The War Room- doc - Amazon Prime

This documentary follows President Clinton's campaign trail and focuses on his aides, James Carville and George Stephanopoulos.

Catriona

Break Up - : How Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon Went to War - Book

Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon's political partnership changed the face of Scotland, bringing the country to within 200,000 votes of independence and holding sway at Holyrood for more than a decade. So how and why has their thirty-year alliance irretrievably broken down?

Break-Up tells the inside story of how the once unbreakable unity of the Scottish National Party was ripped apart amid shocking claims of sexual assault. With unrivalled access to both camps and the women who made the allegations, and with rigorously fair-minded reporting, journalists David Clegg and Kieran Andrews go behind the headlines to uncover the truth about this extraordinary episode, in a piece of political history that reads like a thriller.

Now fully updated, this is a jaw-dropping tale of inappropriate behaviour in the highest reaches of power, of lies, distrust and alleged conspiracy, with profound implications not only for Salmond and Sturgeon themselves but for Scotland's governing party and the wider independence campaign.

David

Wild Thing - book

Paul Gauguin is chiefly known as the giant of post-Impressionist painting whose bold colours and compositions rocked the Western art world. It is less well known that he was a stockbroker in Paris and that after the 1882 financial crash he struggled to sustain his artistry, and worked as a tarpaulin salesman in Copenhagen, a canal digger in Panama City, and a journalist exposing the injustices of French colonial rule in Tahiti.

In Wild Thing, the award-winning biographer Sue Prideaux re-examines the adventurous and complicated life of the artist. She illuminates the people, places and ideas that shaped his vision: his privileged upbringing in Peru and rebellious youth in France; the galvanising energy of the Paris art scene; meeting Mette, the woman who he would marry; formative encounters with Vincent van Gogh and August Strindberg; and the ceaseless draw of French Polynesia.

Prideaux conjures Gauguin's visual exuberance, his creative epiphanies, his fierce words and his flaws with acuity and sensitivity. Drawing from a wealth of new material and access to the artist's family, this myth-busting work invites us to see Gauguin anew.

This week we are in sync with our listeners with all 3 topics matching questions submitted. Thanks to all!

We have our fingers crossed that we can have Stuart back with us next week.

Recommendations:

Angela

Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars - Jenny Lindsay

The last decade has seen countless cases of women being fired, disciplined, protested or no-platformed for their views on sex and gender. Whether high-profile celebrities or previously unknown feminists, such women’s vocal non-belief in ‘gender identity’ as a universal human condition bears a high social cost. These ‘houndings’ are often presented starkly, clinically, in headlines or fleeting social media moments, stripped of the true cost of holding such beliefs.

But what is the reality behind the headlines and noise? What are the true consequences of holding – and living with - such seemingly now-heretical thoughts?

Hounded charts the often hidden and unspoken harms women face for prioritising and defending sex-based language and rights. Outlining the often-bewildering array of tactics used by opponents against such women, as well as the resilience required to refuse to be silenced, Lindsay presents a compelling argument for recognition of the individual and social harms that are being enacted under the auspices of ‘gender identity activism.’ 

This debut non-fiction book by award-winning poet and essayist Jenny Lindsay, whose own ‘hounding’ offers a unique perspective, is a solid, sane, witty but also compassionate account about the very human cost of this extraordinary cultural and political schism.

David

Lena Zavaroni: The Forgotten Child Star - BBC iplayer

Lena Zavaroni was a child superstar, barnstorming the charts, sharing the stage with Sinatra, and performing for the US president, all before her 11th birthday. But her light was dimmed too soon by a battle with anorexia. 

Told from the perspective of her 84-year-old father, Victor, this poignant story reflects on parental regret as he seeks peace with his daughter's untimely fate. 

Inside Barlinnie - BBC iplayer

This series explores the lives of current prisoners and staff as well as delving into a dark history of hangings, riots and escapes that have shaped the prison for over a century.

Eamonn

‘It’s all I think about’: Stanley Tucci on love, grief and pasta - Guardian

Screen favourite, cocktail maker, cancer survivor, sex symbol… Stanley Tucci is a man of many parts. The ‘Tooch’ discusses fame, his new book – and the perils of cooking for children

We are still missing our big pal Cosgrove so we're really grateful to Simon and David for getting the TM jersey on and getting stuck in to the day's subjects.

Recommendations:

Eamonn

In Vogue - the 90's Disney+

The '90s was the decade when high fashion walked off the runway and into mainstream culture. Featuring an A-list cast from the worlds of fashion, film and music, alongside Vogue’s Anna Wintour and Edward Enninful, this landmark series reveals the inside story of the 90’s most celebrated fashion and pop culture moments.

David

Algiers, Third World Capital:Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers - book

The life of an unexpected revolutionary with the Black Panthers in Algiers

Mokhtefi (née Klein), a Jewish American from Long Island, has had an exhilarating life. In the 1960s, she served as a press adviser to the National Liberation Front in postwar Algiers, before going to work with Eldridge Cleaver, who was wanted in the US for his role in a deadly shoot-out with Oakland police. Half a century later, as an eighty-nine-year-old painter living on the Upper West Side, Mokhtefi still seasons her prose with the argot of revolution.

Simon

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

The twentieth century for Palestine and the Palestinians has been a century of denial: denial of statehood, denial of nationhood and denial of history. The Hundred Years War on Palestine is Rashid Khalidi's powerful response.

Drawing on his family archives, he reclaims the fundamental right of any people: to narrate their history on their own terms. Beginning in the final days of the Ottoman Empire, Khalidi reveals nascent Palestinian nationalism and the broad recognition by the early Zionists of the colonial nature of their project. These ideas and their echoes defend Nakba - the Palestinian term for the establishment of the state of Israel - the cession of the West Bank and Gaza to Jordan and Egypt, the Six Day War and the occupation.

Moving through these critical moments, Khalidi interweaves the voices of journalists, poets and resistance leaders with his own accounts as a child of a UN official and a resident of Beirut during the 1982 seige. The result is a profoundly moving account of a hundred-year-long war of occupation, dispossession and colonialisation.

https://www.channel4.com/news/

Hopefully we will have Stuart back with us next week, but in the meantime we are delighted to have two of Scotland’s best commentators on the show - welcome back Angela Haggerty and hot from the Labour Party Conference - Catriona Stewart .

Recommendations:

Eamonn

The Seige - Book - Ben Macintyre

On April 30, 1980, six heavily armed gunmen burst into the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate, overlooking Hyde Park in London. There they took 26 hostages, including embassy staff, visitors, and three British citizens.

A tense six-day siege ensued as millions gathered around screens across the country to witness the longest news flash in British television history, in which police negotiators and psychiatrists sought a bloodless end to the standoff, while the SAS – hitherto an organisation shrouded in secrecy – laid plans for a daring rescue mission: Operation Nimrod.

Drawing on unpublished source material, exclusive interviews with the SAS, and testimony from witnesses including hostages, negotiators, intelligence officers and the on-site psychiatrist, bestselling historian Ben Macintyre takes readers on a gripping journey from the years and weeks of build-up on both sides, to the minute-by-minute account of the siege and rescue.

Recreating the dramatic conversations between negotiators and hostages, the cutting-edge intelligence work happening behind-the-scenes, and the media frenzy around this moment of international significance, The Siege is the remarkable story of what really happened on those fateful six days, and the first full account of a moment that forever changed the way the nation thought about the SAS – and itself.

Angela

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story:

This riveting true-crime drama probes the lives of the Menendez brothers, convicted of the brutal 1989 murders of their parents in Beverly Hills.

Catriona

Tell Me Everything - book - Elizabeth Strout

Tell Me Everything is a hopeful, healing novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world. It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William.

Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. Together, they spend afternoons in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known – “unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them – reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love."

Stuart is off this week so we have brought in the wonderful Angela Haggerty and David Pratt to discus this week's topics with Eamonn at the helm.

Recommendations:

Angela

Darren McGarvey's trauma industrial complex

Royal Society of Edinburgh

Darren McGarvey – author of Poverty Safari and The Social Distance Between Us – began his new project, “The Trauma-Industrial Complex”, by delivering a Signature Lecture at the Royal Society of Edinburgh on Tuesday this week.

Youtube

David

Mozart - Rise of a Genuis

Child prodigy, flawed human, musical giant. Letters, manuscripts and performances reveal the making of a man who created some of the world’s most magnificent music.

Eamonn

Wise Guy David Chase and The Sopranos - Amazon Prime

In WISE GUY David Chase and The Sopranos, acclaimed filmmaker Alex Gibney delves deep into the psyche of renowned "Sopranos" creator and writer, David Chase, to illuminate his life and career while offering a unique window into his unparalleled work on the iconic program.

This week we're talking about yesterday's big Labour vote , the candyfloss royal pop video and discussing what might be the one and only debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

We took as many questions as we could get through and have kept submissions from Lorraine Kerr, Edward Docherty and Gill Blair for next week.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

Paddy

Colin from Accounts - iplayer

Two single(ish) people, brought together by fate, a car accident... and an injured dog. Warm-hearted Aussie rom-com about a flawed, funny couple getting it all utterly wrong.

Eamonn

The Perfect Couple - Netflix

Amelia is about to marry into one of the wealthiest families on Nantucket, until a shocking death derails the wedding — and turns everyone into a suspect.

This week we've given the dynamic duo a chance to talk over this week's headlines by themselves.

Recommendations:

Eamonn

From the Vine - Film - Amazon Prime

A downtrodden man experiences an ethical crisis and travels back to his hometown in rural Italy to recalibrate his moral compass. There he finds new purpose in reviving his grandfather's old vineyard, offering the small town of Acerenza a sustainable future, and reconnecting with his estranged family in the process.

Stuart

Sing Sing - Film - General Release

Based on the real-life arts rehabilitation programme founded at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Greg Kwedar’s new film follows a troupe of incarcerated actors who work on a play as part of a theatre workshop at the prison.

Every six months, the men gather in a circle of chairs, often looking to Divine G (Colman Domingo) to help decide their next play. When he recruits a new member called Divine Eye, he gets more than he bargained for. The group’s dynamic begins to shift as Divine Eye suggests they do a comedy for the first time, prompting the men to throw out a jumble of wild ideas — from pirate ships to Roman gladiators to Old West gunfights. Flustered at first, Divine G quickly starts to see Divine Eye’s discomfort with the vulnerability required for what seems like a silly pursuit. While planning for his own clemency hearing, he tries to forge a connection with Eye, as the men collectively unpack the pain of their experience while undergoing the joy and escape of creativity.

Domingo gives one of the most memorable and affecting performances of his career, bolstered by a cast made up almost entirely of formerly incarcerated actors and alumni of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts programme. Their participation brings an authenticity to the group’s founding principle that human dignity must be a part of the justice system. Directed with a dynamism that matches the charm, mischief, and compassion of the men themselves, Sing Sing recognises the value of a place we can gather in which to discuss, debate, and create, wherever that may be. It’s an ode to art as a process, much the same as life, through which we can strive to better understand ourselves and each other.