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.