Showing 1-16 of 18 Results.
Iona Opie; Peter Opie; Marina Warner |
I was totally blown away by this collection of the new new new journalism, or however many "news" we’re up to these days. I think I like it as much – at times, even more – than Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again. And that, for me, is saying a lot.
Zadie Smith - 10/08/2012 |
Roger Scruton is a philosopher who writes on a wide range of subjects within aesthetics. His observations on art and music are profound and stated with great clarity.
Alexander McCall Smith - 28/07/2011 |
The book that launched a million backpackers - but don’t let it stop you.
Maya Jasanoff - 29/05/2012 |
Still the best book about the Beatles' music. Deserves to be read annually by anyone who cares about pop.
Dylan Jones - 24/07/2012 |
Michel de Montaigne; M.A. Screech You can just dip in at any point and find some thing essential. Heavy to carry around, though. One for the e-reader?
Zadie Smith - 10/08/2012 |
Isaiah Berlin; Henry Hardy Berlin was a philosopher who valued friendship and loved gossip, as his splendidly entertaining correspondence shows.
John Banville - 18/06/2012 |
I've been meaning to read this one for a decade. It’s described in a blurb as "A non-fiction Middlemarch of the underclass" – I don’t think I can do much better than that. Concerning a large, chaotic family in the Bronx during the 1990s, it’s an honest account of street life – from drug dealing to child-rearing. Ms LeBlanc spent ten years embedded, interviewing, living with her subjects, listening to them. An extraordinary feat of research and patience. Reading it you are realize that class is a cocoon and you have absolutely zero idea how anybody else is living. I think this book is a masterpiece.
Zadie Smith - 10/08/2012 |
Emmett Grogan; Peter Coyote Not technically a music book, but includes wonderfully evocative passages about the Diggers and the original Haight Asbury scene. By some distance the best book about the original hippie "vibe".
Dylan Jones - 24/07/2012 |
A quietly thoughtful selection from the huge corpus of folklore about birds, focussing on the thirty of so species that seem most often to attract such traditions and so become carriers of symbolic meaning more generally for us.
Jeremy Mynott - 13/03/2012 |
Middleton A Harris & Toni Morrison I first read this book as a young child and the images in it are part of my earliest memories. Conceived as the scrap-book of a slave (who lives three hundred years), it’s a visual and textual history of the black presence in America. I never get through it without crying.
Zadie Smith - 10/08/2012 |
Freud can be read as literature. The case of Little Hans is memorable and reminds us of the theatrical nature of the Freudian enterprise. Freud wrote up relatively few cases, but they provide a remarkable insight into the world of one of the towering figures of modern times.
Alexander McCall Smith - 28/07/2011 |
If you have young children and think that fairy tales have nothing to teach them in today’s world, read this. Read it even if you don’t have kids. It’s about the vital importance of stories in all of our lives.
Moira Young - 09/08/2012 |
Robert Carroll; Stephen Prickett I figure that I (faithless grandchild of a Methodist preacher) should be familiar with the foundation myths which inform our society so fundamentally. The language is epic, magnificent.
Moira Young - 09/08/2012 |
I’m reading this little book for work, and it’s such an odd thing. It’s a sort of feminist tract: in his roundabout way Soren is arguing that older women have as much, if not more, to offer as younger women. He’s particularly upset that older actresses are often ignored in favour of new ones. Plus ça change.... But really it’s a book about real and false values in the world.
Zadie Smith - 10/08/2012 |
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche; Thomas... A work of art by a very great but frequently misunderstood poet-philosopher.
John Banville - 18/06/2012 |