Category Archives: Review

Book Review: Sue Townsend ~ Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004)

Posted on July 17, 2024 by odeboyz

Unlike Amazon second hand bookshops are a thing of joy and wonder.1 They don’t have brutal efficiency but their customers happily browse. Titles, long forgotten, catch the eye and stimulate the curiosity bud. Was that book as good as remembered? … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Richmal Crompton ~ William: The Gangster (1967)

Posted on June 12, 2024 by odeboyz

I read the William books in 1950s Leeds. Leeds was grey, grim and far, far away from William’s world. There were no Vicar’s wives calling round for tea. No maidservants, no summer house, barns or fields. And there definitely weren’t … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Michael Dobbs ~ The Lords’ Day (2007)

Posted on May 29, 2024 by odeboyz

Michael Dobbs is famous for The House of Cards, which has an international audience. A British and American TV series marks its acceptance as a definitive political novel. This is a red-blooded thriller: A Harry Jones1 novel. Jones has the … Continue reading →

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Film Review: Challengers (2024) ~ (Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Conner)

Posted on May 8, 2024 by odeboyz

I regretted paying £7:99 to watch this drivel until I had a blinding insight. This was my first complete Artificial Intelligence (AI) film. The only human involvement was the ensemble. The script was ChatGPT pure and simple.  Even films with … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Colson Whitehead ~ Sag Harbor (2009)

Posted on April 24, 2024 by odeboyz

This is a coming-of-age novel. Its principal character is  a Black-American teenager. Benji is middle-class attending a private prep school, where he, along with his younger brother, are the only black pupils. His parents own a holiday home in Sag … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Robert Harris ~ Archangel (1998)

Posted on March 27, 2024 by odeboyz

The wonderful thing about Harris is that he’s reliable. He isn’t a book-a-year author featuring drunken, music-loving Detective Inspectors, or psychopathic vigilantes as the principal character. He writes *proper* novels. His stories are carefully plotted. Brilliantly well-written, researched and with … Continue reading →

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The CIA’s 2024 Annual Threat Assessment: Intelligence Community Assessment

Posted on March 20, 2024 by odeboyz

The CIA isn’t interested in the rights and wrongs of international conflicts. Their focus is their impact on the USA. The Gaza Conflict is interesting in this respect. It is facile to think it is tightly located there. “Conflicts, particularly … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Keith Richards (with James Fox) ~ Life (2010)

Posted on March 13, 2024 by odeboyz

Unless you’re a Rolling Stones fan and keen on an autobiography featuring drink, drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll you’re unlikely to enjoy this. It’s filled with endless ‘shock-horror’ moments. Here’s a sample, 1 Gangster Keith 2 Drug addict Keith 3 … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Jonas Jonasson ~ The Prophet and the Idiot (Translator Rachel Willson-Broyles) (2022)

Posted on February 21, 2024 by odeboyz

Jonasson was faced with a huge challenge when writing this book. His previous book ‘The hundred-year-old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared’  sold three million copies. The novel was a comic novel written in Swedish. Jonasson had … Continue reading →

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Ricky Gervais on Gay Marriage

Posted on January 17, 2024 by odeboyz

“Same sex marriage is not a gay privilege, it’s equal rights. Privilege would be something like gay people not paying taxes. Like churches don’t.”

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