Books, Non-fiction

Barbara Ehrenreich - Going To Extremes: Notes From a Divided Nation

17 Jul 2008

POLITICAL NON-FICTION (Granta) Although any balanced reader might browse the political essays and features of left-wing American commentator Barbara Ehrenreich and get a vague sense of agitprop being deployed, perhaps that’s just the author’s bold…

Bob Levin - Most Outrageous

3 Jul 2008

NON-FICTION/BIOG (Fantagraphics) Looking for a suitable subject for the follow-up to his book The Pirates and the Mouse – a wickedly funny account of a gang of comic book creators who satirised themselves into court with the Disney Corporation, Bob…

Taylor Clark

28 Feb 2008

Full fat? Half fat? Skinny? A shot of eggnog syrup maybe? Since the coffee house revolution of the 1990s, your morning cup comes in an endless myriad of permutations. It wasn’t always like this of course, there was a time PS (Pre Starbucks) that coffee…

Mark Everett interview

Family plot

31 Jan 2008

When Mark Oliver Everett was nine years old and home alone, a plane crashed in his neighbourhood. Stumbling outside, he wandered through the carnage of burning wreckage and body parts before returning to his house. ‘Just another day in my weird life,…

Virgins

Anke Bernau

20 Sep 2007

In these enlightened days, discussions about virginity are spread freely across many areas of life from the school playgrounds of the world to the policy departments of the Republican Party. But it wasn’t always this way. In this lively book from Anke…

Neil Boorman

6 Sep 2007

LIFESTYLE TALE Your response to this book by London lifestyle journalist and publisher Neil Boorman is likely to correspond directly with your attachment to the very thing it challenges: brands, and the emotionally loaded consumerist machinery that…

Sid Waddell

6 Sep 2007

SPORTS MEMOIR Certainly among the most quixotic sports memoirs to have been published in recent times, this trip down memory lane from the iconic Geordie darts commentator Sid Waddell is a blessing for fans of the man and the sport (although it’s…

Andrew Marr

16 Aug 2007

Andrew Marr has always used his vast intellect with such wit and verve that he has always come across as a political pundit real people could enjoy. It’s hard to imagine David Frost interviewing Gordon Brown on a Sunday morning, as Marr did last month…

Germaine Greer

16 Aug 2007

Writer, academic, critic and commentator Germaine Greer has been a particularly bristly thorn in establishment sides for the best part of 40 years. A native of Melbourne, she sprang fully-formed onto the global literary stage with The Female Eunuch, her…

Julian Baggini

16 Aug 2007

Julian Baggini is certainly not afraid to engage with popular culture. He recently wrote this on BBC online: ‘Matt Groening is the true heir of Plato, Aristotle and Kant’. Although this article landed Baggini a mention in Private Eye, he talks of the…

Lavinia Greenlaw

16 Aug 2007

Lavinia Greenlaw’s latest book, The Importance of Music to Girls, is a memoir recalling her girlhood rendered through music. Beginning with her first musical memory of waltzing on her father’s feet, it meanders through the musicals and recorder practice…

Matthew Collin

16 Aug 2007

At the turn of the 21st century, uprisings against undemocratic governments in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine benefited from a prominent youth resistance, with groups using humour and satire to undermine the authorities. ‘After Otpor in Serbia, similar…

Richard Dawkins

16 Aug 2007

These are combative times to be a God-denier. It’s not only loopy Christians who are trying to make us believe the world was made in a week, now certain Muslims are jumping on the creationist bandwagon. Turkey’s Adnan Oktar, writing as Harun Yahya, has…

Anthony Holden

Old school poker shark

9 Aug 2007

As a biographer of the Royals, Shakespeare and Tchaikovsky, as well being the classical music critic of the Observer, Anthony Holden has always been a respected writer but it is the less respectable subject of poker that has given him his biggest sales.

Frank Muir

9 Aug 2007

If Festival visitors were asked where they expect Scottish crime novels to be set, a fair few would probably think of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh first, or Denise Mina’s Glasgow.

Get Smashed

(Hodder & Stoughton)

9 Aug 2007

MEDIA HISTORY This is the story of the 1960s advertising revolution that led to the shedding of jingles and rigid formulae in favour of a certain whimsy, spurred on by the visions of a handful of people who made a tidy fortune. Sam Delaney chronicles…

Kids Events

9 Aug 2007

When you say ‘comic’ to a kid they might think of the Beano or Roy of the Rovers (if you’re a kid over 35) but the event with Alan Grant & Cam Kennedy will open up the eyes of teenagers and any young at heart adults in tow. Graphic novels are something…

Will Hutton

9 Aug 2007

It’s not many people that can make dense economic theory and political machinations accessible to the casual reader, but Will Hutton is one such man. Formerly the editor-in-chief of the Observer and What the Papers Say political journalist of the year…

Bad Men

Clive Stafford Smith

23 Apr 2007

POLITICAL ESSAY Clive Stafford Smith has been privy to some horrible maltreatments of human beings down the years. As a Cornishman with dual UK/US citizenship, he is seen as a saviour to the many Death Row prisoners he has tried to rescue from lethal…

Richard Dawkins

The God Delusion (Bantam)

28 Sep 2006

Like a latter day John Thomas Scopes (the Tennessee biology teacher who was the inspiration for the play and film Inherit the Wind) Richard Dawkins has long been vocal about his belief that all children should be taught the Darwinian Theory of Evolution…

An Inconvenient Truth

Al Gore (Bloomsbury)

4 Sep 2006

It would have been so easy for Al Gore to have become a horribly embittered individual after being cheated out of the US presidency in 2000. No one would have faulted him for spending the rest of his life sticking pins into effigies of Florida governor…

Al Gore

An Inconvenient Truth (Bloomsbury)

1 Sep 2006

SOCIAL ESSAY It would have been so easy for Al Gore to have become a horribly embittered individual after being cheated out of the US presidency in 2000. No one would have faulted him for spending the rest of his life sticking pins into effigies of…