Television tome that needs tuning
The Magic Box is Rob Young’s impassioned, occasionally impenetrable, psycho-history of the TV of his youth
Tangled up in the myth of Dylan
Age hasn’t withered Dylan. He was always running towards it, arms open wide.
Rehabilitation of a great stylist
Christopher Bray thinks Roth’s “novelist’s autobiography” is one of his most fizzing examinations of the stories that construct our various selves
Gloriously bad company
Do we really need another biography about Francis Bacon? The answer is emphatically yes, says Christopher Bray
Peculiar world of a singular talent
Highsmith was a great writer, with a moral vision bracing enough to clarify the terrors of the twentieth century
Bedtime reading for boomers
You will search in vain for a new life of any rocker who made his name after the advent of punk
Derrida deconstructed
Derrida’s prose, which stops being turgid only in order to be turbid, is utterly incomprehensible
Time flies, relatively speaking
The older you are, the quicker you count out a minute
An incomplete history of the Swinging Sixties
Any history of the 1960s that neglects mass culture is not to be taken entirely seriously
The jokes must go on
Christopher Bray reviews Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen