Gary Marshall In one of his routines, Eddie Izzard explains why supermarkets don’t have toilet rolls on display near the entrance in case you think “this is a poo shop! Everything in here is poo!”. Your first impression of The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman may well be similar, as the first chapter revels in […]
Steven Kelly: The War Artist
Gary Marshall Steven Kelly is the editor of online UK literary magazine The Richmond Review and, being mature professionals, we were looking forward to sticking the knife into this, his fourth novel. All in the name of highbrow literary criticism, of course. Unfortunately for us, The War Artist is great. Although the plot initially seems […]
Peter Guralnick: Careless Love: The Unmaking Of Elvis Presley
Gary Marshall I was five years old when Elvis died and, like most of my generation, my knowledge of Elvis is derived largely from muck-raking biographies, shockingly bad films, sightings documented in supermarket tabloids and documentaries about brain-damaged Elvis impersonators. With the exception of U2’s embarrassing fandom no modern bands list Elvis as an influence […]
Victor Olliver: Farce Hole
Gary Marshall Citron Press has, perhaps unfairly, been derided as a vanity publisher. Billing itself as a writers’ collective and endorsed by none other than Martin Amis, the company certainly charge prospective authors considerably less than the average vanity company and do seem to make an effort to market their books. It’s difficult to be […]
Richard Dawkins: Climbing Mount Improbable
Gary Marshall It’s tempting to see Richard Dawkins as the Jeremy Clarkson of Darwinism, chainsmoking Marlboros and cackling as he writes in his diary: “To-do on Monday: wind up Creationists”. Although the image is perhaps a little far-fetched, it’s safe to say that Climbing Mount Improbable is unlikely to top the recommended reading lists of […]
Richard Dooling: Brainstorm
Gary Marshall One of the biggest publishing success stories of the last decade has been the legal thriller where bright young turks defend truth, justice and the American way. Attorney-turned-novelist Richard Dooling has obviously spotted this and, with Brainstorm, attempts to bring some new life to the genre. In addition to the usual legal shenanigans […]
Happy Mondays : Greatest Hits
Gary Marshall At the very beginning of the 1990s, the Happy Mondays were one of the most exciting new bands around. At a time when Indie music consisted largely of floppy fringes, effects pedals and a complete absence of charisma or tunes, the arrival of a band that understood the power of the “last gang […]
Travis : The Man Who
Gary Marshall The album cover is a photograph of Travis standing in the snow wearing big coats, reminiscent of U2, but if you’re expecting an album of breast-beating stadium rock then you’ll be surprised. Fran Healy may have announced “All I Wanna Do Is Rock” on the band’s first album but “The Man Who” is […]
Alex Garland : The Beach : Backpacker Blues
Nancy Rawlinson finds out why The Beach author Alex Garland is still unsure of his writing success No matter where you go on this small planet of ours, you will encounter ‘Garland’s Law.’ That is, for every 10 people under the age of thirty that you meet, approximately 3.33 per cent of them will have […]
Liam Howlett : The Prodigy: The Dirtchamber Sessions : Down In The Dirt
Jayne Margetts encounters The Prodigy’s Liam Howlett going solo with The Dirtchamber Sessions There is no easy way to put this, but Liam Paris Howlett is the pin-up poster boy of electronic punk. Choice doesn’t enter into the equation. The scions of street cred and music bibles Mixmag, Loaded and The Face would fight tooth […]
Laura Hird: Nail And Other Stories
Gary Marshall Rebel Inc was started in 1992 with the intention of promoting “a new wave of young urban Scottish writers who were kicking back against the literary mainstream”. Laura Hird first appeared on their “Children Of Albion Rovers” collection and Nail And Other Stories is her first short story collection for the publisher. The […]
James Adams: The Next World War
Chris Mitchell James Adams is the former defence correspondent for the Sunday Times and the author of several books about the changing role of the world’s military forces in the post-Cold War climate. The Next World War examines the impact of technology on the future of armed conflict and the decisive importance of what has […]
Margaret Wertheim: The Pearly Gates Of Cyberspace
Chris Mitchell Cyberspace is perhaps the last place you’d look for some sort of spiritual revival at the end of the twentieth century. But Margaret Wertheim believes that cyberspace is indeed a contemporary secular version of the medieval conception of Heaven – that is, a space which exists somewhere beyond or outside our everyday world. […]
Jonathan Hale: From A Great Height
Gary Marshall Access is always a problem for the would-be biographer and the phrase “unauthorised biography” is usually a sign of a cut-and-paste job written by a bored hack who has little or no affection for the band. The notoriously private Radiohead suffer more than most from this syndrome and a number of piss-poor biographies […]
Richard Beard: Damascus
Gary Marshall Do you remember the Fighting Fantasy books? Computer games for people whose parents wouldn’t buy them a computer, each page of a Fighting Fantasy book would end with a number of choices. If you wanted to attack the skeleton with a sword you would turn to page 33; if you wanted to scream […]
Alexander Poznansky : Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man : Enigma Variations
Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man Alexander Poznansky Lewis Owens More than a hundred years after his death, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky remains a greatly loved but still deeply enigmatic figure. However, in his comprehensive and illuminating biography Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man, Alexander Poznansky has brilliantly employed the personal correspondence and documentation […]
Irvine Welsh: Alan Warner: Queerspotting: Homosexuality in contemporary Scottish fiction: Queerspotting
Zoe Strachan drags Irvine Welsh’s and Alan Warner’s writing from out of the closet… Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electric tin openers. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. But […]
Jeff Buckley : Grace
Gary Marshall Grace was Jeff Buckley’s first fully-fledged album. It also turned out to be his last as, on 29th May 1997, he drank some wine, went for a swim and didn’t come back. As anyone who pored over “All Apologies” in the aftermath of Kurt Cobain’s suicide will attest, whenever an artist dies young […]
P.J. O’Rourke : Eat The Rich : Biting Satire
Susan Wright meets P.J. O’Rourke and discovers even economics can be fun if done the P.J. way… It’s 10.15 am on a Monday morning, and O’Rourke is introducing himself in the Langham Hilton in London. He manages to look different from the photographs that adorn his book covers by being smaller than you might expect […]
Ben Elton: Blast From The Past
Gary Marshall If you’ve read any of Ben Elton’s previous books, you know more or less what to expect. A bit of unfunny comedy, cardboard characters and some lame political comment presented in fifty-foot letters of fire. Previously Elton shocked the world by suggesting that pollution was maybe not A Good Thing; this time round […]
Irvine Welsh: Filth
Gary Marshall When Trainspotting rapidly grew from underground publishing success story to zeitgeist-surfing, underworld-soundtracked cultural event, Irvine Welsh was described as a spokesman for a generation and the most exciting writer in Scotland. While the use of language and setting was something of a novelty first time round, Filth is Welsh’s fifth novel and revisits […]
Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess: Stardust
Antony Johnston Neil Gaiman once told a group of schoolchildren, “When I was your age, people told me not to make things up. Now I get paid to do it.” And at first glance Stardust seems to be a book for just that audience. A compilation of what was originally a four-issue series, this is […]
Alan Moore: Voice Of The Fire
Antony Johnston Voice of the Fire is Alan Moore’s debut novel. But Moore has been writing for as long as this reviewer can remember. Starting with the odd Future Shock and Time Twister for 2000AD, his radically original subject matter and unashamedly emotional style soon led to serial commissions, the most famous being the award-winning […]
Magnus Mills: The Restraint Of Beasts
Gary Marshall As a general rule, the more hype that surrounds a book the bigger the disappointment when you finally get to read it. And The Restraint Of Beasts has certainly been hyped. Nominations for the Booker Prize notwithstanding, we have been inundated with tabloid stories of the rags-to-riches variety describing how Magnus Mills wrote […]
Ian Rankin: Dead Souls
Gary Marshall Most police thrillers conform to a strict blueprint – a misunderstood outsider who’s willing to risk his career and his life to get his man, villains who are inevitably the personification of evil and of course a bevvy of beautiful women with a truncheon fixation. Everything is presented in stark black and white […]
