you’re an idiot and a liar!! fact is! you’ve opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it! you dont get a free flight, there is no dynamic data to render which is prob why you got 0.00. what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway AND puts they’re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!

has to say something about the kind of people Ryanair employs. It was posted to the blog of Jason Roe by an anonymous member of Ryanair’s staff (something the company has admitted). A very unrepentant Head of Communications riposted that this is what we must expect if we want to play with the big boys! I think he’s shown just how small they are! God how we’ve changed in Ireland! I’m old enough to remember when even our critics were treated with common courtesy. Bear this behaviour in mind when you have any reason to interact with them.

I remember when the world and his wife were talking and raving about La Vita è Bella (It’s a Beautiful Life) by Roberto Benigni. While the idea was nice – a slightly surreal and comic fable about getting through the horror and misery of a concentration camp – I felt that Benigni had not carried it off for me. I found him to be smug and rather misogynistic and I thus found the film to be flawed.

On the other hand, previous directors have achieved the fairy-tale-like world that such a film promises. My all time favourite in this genre is Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso. Now at last we have another gem to add to our list of the finest Italian films.

Nanni Moretti plays a bereaved husband with an astonishing reaction to his wife’s untimely death. Though a high-flying executive, he finds himself unable to return to work and instead he drops his daughter to school daily and waits in the park outside the school for her. Grimaldi unfolds a wonderful fable as this man begins to touch the lives of everyone who passes through the park. Few words are needs, and most of these are his own thoughts as he composes lists. Ex-colleagues drop by seeking advice, he is promoted in spite of his absence, and gradually he comes to terms with his life. The sound track is fantastic, including the hypnotic Pyramid Song from Radiohead.

The characters are wonderfully drawn, notably his daughter, his brother and his sister-in-law. The only false note in th entire film is the horribly misjudged inclusion of a sex scene which, in its violence, clashes with the serenity of the rest. A must see.

Here’s a little experiment to try out on yourself.  Go to a part of the bookshop you never visit and choose a book on a subject you’d never usually consider.  Last week I tried it out by accident and I stumbled on this little gem.  Actually, I wandered into the psychology rows, looking for a book, Musicophilia by Dr. Oliver Sachs. I’d heard his podcast and the book sounded interesting.  Having located it, it struck me as rather dry. I changed my mind, chastised myself for wandering in where I didn’t belong and then I stumbled on Lauren Slater.  Her book, that is.

This is a little book describing ten advances in research psychology, but from a very human angle.  She talks about the experimenters and their subjects (animal and human) and herself.  The experiments were often controversial, using methods on the ethical frontier, and the conclusions disputed.  Slater herself is often present in the narrative, evaluating her own reactions, drawing examples bravely and even recklessly from her own life, and experimenting with herself as guinea pig.  She meets many of the protagonists and is blunt (and sometimes indiscreet) in her judgement and reporting on them.  She is balanced and open-minded about the experiments, setting out the pros and cons and letting the reader decide.

I found the whole a delightful and easy read for an utter novice in the field and I’ll be roaming unfamiliar aisles in my bookshop in search of more surprises.

I read somewhere recently that Iain had to drag himself away from computer games to work on his books.  I’m sad to say, it looks like he’s losing the battle.  Following on his The Steep Approach to Garbadale, this is the second effort in a row that just wasn’t worth the trouble.  For many years I considered him the very best science fiction writer on the planet and his recent The Algebraist was as good as they come.

Although packed with his signature inventiveness, this book fails utterly to deliver on plot which boils down to: wicked aide kills king, prince flees to seek his (Culture trained) sister and wanders the universe to find her, meets several of Bank’s fantastic (but mainly irrelevant) civilisations on his journey and returns to claim his inheritance after battling the ‘dragon’ who avenged him.

If you haven’t read Banks, don’t despair, there’s a treasure trove of his work available.  Avoid this one – it is the worst!

Kader Abdolah is a pen-name, constructed from the names of two of the author’s friends murdered in the troubles surrounding the Islamic Revolution in Iran.  This is my second experience of his writing, the first being Cunéiforme (My Father’s Notebook) and I conclude he will come to be recognised as a great and subtle writer.  Right now his books are slow to appear in English.

This is a book by an exile who loves the country he fled.  He writes with a light touch, spanning decades and giving us a view of the country during both the Shah’s reign and the Khomeini years from the point of view of the peaceful head of a household who is repeatedly drawn by family members into confrontation with the authorities.  The disgraceful conduct of America in supporting the Shah’s regime and in supporting Saddam Hussein’s savage chemical war gets a restrained and honest airing in the book.

It’s so easy to dismiss Iran, based on the country as reported to us in the evening news.  Read this book for an entirely new perspective on a dignified and cultivated people living under two consecutive intolerable regimes.

This is the most amazing film about loneliness. Without much explanation we follow a morose group of policemen from Alexandria as they are stood up by their driver in a remote airport in Israel and attempt to make their way to an even more remote town to play a concert. Tewfiq, the leader, is a sad little man whose personal history emerges over the course of the film. All the others are deferential and obedient except Khaled, the jazz loving trumpet player. Under the prompting of sexually charged and equally lonely waitress Dina, the locals show an awkward hospitality until the band can be put back on track. That’s all folks!

This little party of Israeli and Palestinian actors have produced a film I hardly expect to be bettered in 2008. The situation, laughs and all, is totally true to life and the ending much more believable than the one we hope for.

This book should win Auster new admirers wrote the Sunday Telegraph on the jacket of my paperback copy. Faint praise indeed from the anonymous author, but more than this travesty deserves. I discovered Auster when his New York Trilogy was first published about twenty years ago and delighted in a new and interesting voice in world literature. Since then, sadly, the quality of his works has been very mixed, with none scaling the heady summits of The City of Glass. The recent Travels in the Scriptorium was a decent if imperfect effort. Not so this folly.

This one is told in the first person by Nathan Glass, a retired insurance salesman. The quality of the writing is about what I’d expect from an insurance salesman. Auster often packs his books with stories and this one is no exception. However, these tales are implausible, sentimental twaddle for the most part. The characters are among the cheesiest I’ve met. I shouldn’t have persevered to the end but I felt I owed it to Auster for his better work. Who knows? Maybe it was a big joke and the punchline would be revealed on the last page. Wrooong!! Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the last page arrived:

It was eight o’clock when I stepped out onto the street, eight o’clock on the morning of September 11, 2001 – just forty six minutes before the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre.

There wasn’t a dry seat in the house! Sorry Paul, I’ve been loyal and I’ve been patient, but when a publisher is screaming for the next book, don’t let him have it unless it’s really ready.

What do you do when a parent retreats into the condition of a child, becomes helpless, needs nappies. You find a crèche for adults, a retirement home, with lots of facilities they can no longer avail of because, actually, they’re bedridden, but it makes you feel better.

That’s the message in this sensitive examination of two siblings called to sort out the final months of their dad’s life. The director has a little fun at the expense of retirement villages, but the basic message is a serious one: looking after mum/dad is not as rewarding as looking after junior; there’s too much history there and we’re busy managing our own hectic lives. This dad was not a very loving one but his dutiful offspring conduct his final days with affection and dignity; I’m not sure I can do it so well. The film is a beautifully observed portrait more in the European tradition of nuance substituting for plot. Its genuine intimacy reminded me of The Squid and the Whale. No doubt it was the academic context.

Never throw out your unread books. You’ll come back to them! I remember an unsuccessful attempt on this book about twenty five years ago, but a recent recommendation put it back in my mind. I completed it last September and found it a truly excellent read. Perhaps it’s my age and I was ready for it. The author of this autobiographical fiction was three years younger than me when he wrote it and picked up the Nobel Prize for Literature for his efforts.

A very modern novel, with little or no plot, the narrative takes place in the mind of Herzog, who I understand is a fairly fair depiction of Bellow and a rather pathetic fellow really. I decided I had nothing to say about this complicated and interesting novel until I had the good fortune to hear, this week, a 90-minute podcast by Robert Adams concerning the book. This is such a really fine testament to the book that I decided I’d write it up just to link to it.

Read the book and, only then, listen to the lecture. Thank heavens for really fine writers.

I’ve enjoyed a number of Samoza’s works and threw myself enthusiastically into this one. In a short time I began to be quite horrified by the theme but a certain morbid curiosity kept me struggling onward and the more time I invested, the harder it was to pull away from what is finally, a sinister and ugly story. It describes a world where art has descended to a new low. The canvases are now people who, horror of horrors, wish to be enslaved in this exploitative profession for which they are highly paid. The unsuccessful become household furnishings, lamps, tables, ash-trays, worthless trinkets. You’ve seen elaborate tables with marble nudes supporting them. Somoza imagined them real and his terrific imagination was able to conceive that they’d covet and enjoy their work.

As always, I admire the sheer scope of his imagination, but he’s begun to strike me, deep down, as a dirty old man. As in much art, his models pass much of their time naked and he revels in describing them and humiliating them. I’m appalled that I made it to the end. The plot involves the hunt for a vicious killer who is destroying valuable works (which happen to be human, but it is their value that provokes the hunt). Lucas Bosch (named perhaps for Hieronymus Bosch, a painter of grotesque works which look cheerful beside the depraved oeuvre described in this book) eventually saves model Clara who depicts a living version of Rembrandt’s Susanna (shown right).