Nick Hornby
Wanna Get Funky?
It’s no use pretending that this book will be of interest to every Literary Review reader, so let's get rid of the riffraff: Shots From the Hip is a collection of the pop journalist Charles Shaar Murray's interviews and record reviews between 1971, when he was writing for Oz, and 1990, when he was writing for the Daily Telegraph – a long, strange trip indeed, and anyone who wants to read any significance into the termini would probably be right to do so.
It is a book that means a lot to me personally. During the early-to-mid Seventies, when I was a teenage schoolboy at a suburban grammar school, I trusted Murray in a way that I have never trusted a critic since. On the cash I earned from my evening job I
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The Anatomy of Melancholy 'has never quite become a widely recognised, bona fide "classic". For long stretches, the bulk of its readership has been restricted to bibliophiles and scholars. It has had an air of murkiness and desuetude'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/phantoms-of-the-mind
'Don’t think of Watergate as being about a break-in, but about what the break-in exposed: dirty ops, dirty tricks, dirty money.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/all-the-presidents-mendacity
'The leopard skins that she wore like a big-game hunter, the swaggering strut ... every detail semaphored power and valiantly atoned for inadequacy.'
Peter Conrad weighs up Laura Fairrie's documentary about Jackie Collins and her 'shag-happy fiction'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/easy-writer