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Hits: 0Philip Norman – Weidenfeld and Nicolson – £20 It is generally accepted that Jimi Hendrix is the most important guitarist in the history of rock music. In just four years he revolutionised everybody’s idea of what an electric guitar was capable of, set new standards for showmanship, and left a dazzling catalogue of recordings. Poster boy for the 27 Club (rock musicians who died at that age), Hendrix died in London fifty years ago. That anniversary prompted Philip Norman to add to his wonderful series of biographies of the greats. We joined Philip in his garden to talk about what Jimi Hendrix still means to us.

Hits: 0 Larry Watson – Algonquin Books  £21.99   $27.95 The Lives of Edie Pritchard is Larry Watson’s eleventh novel, and he is at the height of his powers. It is a big novel set in Larry’s back yard of the states where the Midwest becomes the West. We follow the heroine Edie through three points in her life from a young married woman through to her early old age and grandmotherhood, as she learns that she cannot escape from being the person that others need her to be. “When you’re back home you never have a chance to be someone other than who you were then. Even if you never … Continue reading →

Hits: 1245 Liz Williams – Reaktion Books – £15.95 In her discussion of Stonehenge, Liz Williams writes: “There is a legend that Merlin simply flew the entire circle from Ireland, which I think we can rule out.” This is typical of her approach. She is not embarrassed by the unprovable, but has a robust attitude to the wilder flights of fancy. Thus, she makes judicious assessments of, for instance, claims that present magic accesses ancient knowledge (weak), and considers what we can actually know about druidic practices (not much for sure), but she does find the roots and traces of pre-christian spirituality in a culture which didn’t take notes. We … Continue reading →

Hits: 399 Chris Kirkham – Wallace Publishing – £8.99

Hits: 646 Stephen Tow – Rowman and Littlefield £15.99 To have been young in London in the 1960’s must have been very heaven. At least if you had a yen to see live music in clubs and pubs and a dilapidated hotel on an island in the River Thames. The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, Cream, Pink Floyd… (stop me when it gets dizzying). The city was a musical crucible, taking American jazz and blues, English folk and whimsy, and a host of European influences, and transmuting them into the spun gold of classic rock, with a little help from art colleges and a couple of fellows … Continue reading →

Hits: 674 Well-behaved women don’t make history, and we need to be a bit grown up about our approach to feminism. That is the starting point of the new book from Helen Lewis. Lewis is a trenchant and thoughtful journalist, and also an amusing and witty contributor to satirical BBC shows. Happily both these sides of her outlook are on display in this entertaining book. By focussing on eleven of the struggles that have got us this far in the quest for an equal society – Divorce, Education, Abortion, Safety and so on – she discusses the history, the current issues, the state of play and the women who got … Continue reading →

Hits: 3247 Barry Forshaw – Oldcastle Books    £12.99 Barry Forshaw is one of the UK’s leading experts on crime fiction. Writer, commentator, editor, broadcaster and enthusiast, his fingerprints are everywhere. If anybody knows where the bodies are buried, it is he. Why is crime fiction the most popular of all genres? It’s a mystery, an enigma, a puzzle. And every puzzle has a solution. Tim Haigh pounded the mean streets and leant on his informers, he sifted the evidence and demolished the alibis, he kissed the femme fatale and sent the samples to the forensic lab to be… forensicced, and eventually he felt Barry’s collar, hauling him down the nick … Continue reading →

Hits: 2376 Steve Richards – Atlantic Books £20 You have to wonder why the office of Prime Minister is so coveted. While many politicians aspire to Number Ten, more or less all the Prime Ministers in this book spent at least some of their time in office in political Hell. And yet they typically cling on to office like grim death, and in some cases never get over its loss. Steve Richards, the most thoughtful and incisive of journalists and commentators, has written a detailed and hugely entertaining study of the nine Prime Ministers of the modern era, from Harold Wilson to Theresa May. Packed with anecdote and analysis, and … Continue reading →

Hits: 881 Professor James Bernard Murphy and Graeme Garrard – Bloomsbury: £10.49 In an overview of the great political thinkers of the ages, comprising thirty of the most trenchant minds in history, you would imagine that there would be room for the Sage of Hounslow. But for some reason Plato, Aquinas, Hobbes and Kant are all preferred to Tim Haigh, who doesn’t rate a chapter to himself. Go figure. “Politics”, wrote Lord Roseberry, “…is an evil-smelling bog.” It is the thesis of this brisk tour d’horizon that on the contrary, ideas matter in political discourse, and the writers pursue this notion with a kind of Plutarch’s lives of great philosophers. … Continue reading →

Hits: 974 Mike Isaac – Norton: £19.99 It is not unusual in Silicon Valley for head office to lay on dinner for the employees. The cost is nugatory in these fabulously money-rich tech companies and it encourages people to work past quitting time, and eat before going home. It is typical of Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber, that he gave this practice a twist – he stipulated that dinner would not be served before 8:15 p.m. And that story is about the most benign thing we learn about him in Mike Isaac’s wonderfully lucid account of Kalanick and the business he built in his own monstrous image. Dazzling growth, commitment … Continue reading →

Hits: 2420 Ray Connolly – Malignon £7.95 “I’d like to say Thank You on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we’ve passed the audition.” John Lennon on the roof of the Apple Building on January 30th 1969 at the end of the last public Beatles performance. It had been the Greatest Show on Earth, but what if it hadn’t happened? What if the Beatles had not passed the vital 1962 audition with George Martin at Parlophone which got them their recording deal? As well as being a friend of the Beatles, Ray Connolly is exactly contemporary with them, and comes from the same part of the world. … Continue reading →

Hits: 899 Ross Barnett – Bloomsbury £16.99 15,000 years ago, Britain was a very different place. The ice age was ending, and the country was lush and untamed. Sea level was then so low that Dogger Bank, in the North Sea, was then Doggerland, and our ancestors lived there, sharing the land with a dazzling variety of megafauna – big animals to you and me. And what a cast list – lions, wolves, woolly mammoths and rhinos, bears and bison and many more. For palaeontologist, Dr Ross Barnett, this was barely yesterday. Unlike the dinosaurs, people exactly like us met these animals and knew them. They have only just disappeared. … Continue reading →

Hits: 649 Robert Elliott Smith – Bloomsbury    £20.00   In the privacy of my complacency, I am pleased to count myself moderately bright – not Stephen Fry clever but, you know, able to tie my own shoelaces and read without moving my lips. So it is bracing for me to venture from time to time into areas of learning where I find myself very much the pedestrian, and the reason I do here is because I am very interested in the matter of how algorithms impact upon our lives and in the relation between artificial intelligence and human consciousness. Rob Smith is a bona fide expert in evolutionary algorithms. He has … Continue reading →

Hits: 598 What is the purpose of debate? Is it to convince somebody, somewhere of something, or is it merely to undermine the other side and bolster your own prejudices? You may have noticed that political discourse is not always conducted in a civil and measured manner. Especially when the participants are physically removed from each other, say via journalistic writing or social media. In particular, right-wing polemicists are fond of throwing around terms like ‘libtards’, and claiming to have ‘crushed’ or ‘destroyed’ their opponents. There is an unattractive swagger to the claims of some of these people to have exclusive title to the use of logic. Ben Burgis, a … Continue reading →

Hits: 507 We all have our guilty pleasures. Mine include horror films, prog rock and, for the purposes of this interview, comic books. For me it was American super-heroes: Batman and the Fantastic Four and speech balloons screaming, “Mortal, I say thee nay!” and “Not all my power can save me!” But actually, comic books have come a long way since the cheap paper and four-colour separation of my childhood. They are glossier, they are more detailed, much better presented, and much more expensive. Joel Meadows takes a tour of some of the finest and most illustrious practitioners of the art of graphic story-telling, bearding them in their lairs – … Continue reading →

Hits: 2674 A man can travel well and he can travel badly*. The hero of Randy Ross’s God Bless Cambodia is on the ‘badly’ end of the scale. At 48 Randy Burns is tired of ‘the miserable game’ (dating). He has been laid off from his job. His friends are getting paired up and unavailable to him. And then in a bookshop he comes across a travel guide that promises marvels and delights if he were to take a four month tour of the world on the cheap. It is lying. A succession of red-eye flights takes Randy through South America, Europe, Africa and the far east, searching for romance, … Continue reading →

Hits: 1503 When we use the word ‘philosophy’ what we usually mean is “western philosophy’. But as the philosopher and bestselling author Julian Baggini points out in his new book, western philosophy accounts for only around 20% of the world’s population. Other peoples have other philosophical traditions, and as Dr Baggini argues, the underlying philosophical assumptions inform and shape the ways we think and live, even if we never consider them. Tim is perhaps the ideal reader for this book, insofar as he is fairly parochial in his philosophical outlook, and he found it stimulating to be asked to consider the bigger picture and see how other traditions chime with, … Continue reading →

Hits: 3370 “Many people ask what are Beatles? Why Beatles? We will tell you. It came in a vision – a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them ‘From this day on you are Beatles with an ‘A’. Thank you, mister man, they said, thanking him.”  So wrote John Lennon, shortly before he became the most famous man on the planet. And that’s all the background you’re getting. Tim is a self-confessed Beatles anorak. Many people have Chekhov’s Revolver on their mantelpiece, but only Tim has Stanislavski’s Sgt Pepper and Dostoevsky’s Rubber Soul as well. And he is only too delighted to delve into the minutiae of … Continue reading →

Hits: 3317 2016 was a bad year. Globally, it was the year of Brexit and was rounded off with a Trump!  It was bad for pop music too: David Bowie had died in January. And then it seemed the heroes were rushing for the exit.   Bowie was closely followed by Merle Haggard and Glen Frey (of the Eagles), and later in the year, Lemmy, Sir George Martin, Leonard Cohen, George Michael and a dozen others. And then on April 21st, Prince, died. On the personal level Tom Kirkham was already having a bad year. He was feeling his mental health wobbling. And Tom Idolised Prince. He was devastated. He felt the urgent … Continue reading →

Hits: 2339 John Maynard Keynes said, “Above all, let finance be primarily national.” Keynes understood the dangers of unfettered finance, and if he’d had his way the Bretton Woods system of international controls would have been still stronger. In his new book, the distinguished journalist and commentator, Robert Kuttner, writes, “Government needs to explicitly assert its right to prevent global laissez-faire forces from undermining its capacity to devise and broker a decent social compact at home.” Kuttner’s book brilliantly sketches the construction before and after the Second World War of a system in which capitalism was effectively regulated and delivered widespread benefits, at least within the western democracies, and its … Continue reading →