Saturday 10 October 2015

Book reviews

I've never been very up-to-date in my reading. The majority of the books I own were bought in charity shops, which normally means I'm at least a decade behind the times.

But recently I've been doing some book reviewing, which has given me a chance to read newly published work. And very good a great deal of it is. Unfortunately, some of the reviews aren't available online - so you can't read my piece on Peter Doggett's fine Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the I-Phone - 125 Years of Pop Music unless you subscribe to the Literary Review

I would, though, direct you to my thoughts on a trio of excellent books: Charlotte Higgins's This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC, Philipp Blom's Fracture: Life and Culture in the West 1918-1938 and Dominic Sandbrook's The Great British Dream Factory.

And on the subject of the latter, I would also cite the enthusiasm expressed by Jessie Thompson in the Huffington Post, in which she praises 'a book that is written with the same clarity, energy and humour as Alwyn W Turner's brilliant books on recent history'.

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