Drugs

Film noir was the term coined by the French in the late 1940s to describe the genre of Hollywood crime movies which probed the darkness that lay in the shadows cast by all that bright Californian sunlight. The Beach Boys, who broke through in the early 1960s with a repertoire that hymned, in five-part harmonies, the Golden State’s promise of sun, sand and waves, bronzed bodies, beach-party ‘babes’, hot rods and open highways, were – and remain – the quintessential Californian band. But their story, an unhappy family saga featuring the three Wilson brothers (Brian, Carl and Dennis) and cousin Mike Love, is, like that of California’s itself, as dark

I must say, calling a book Fires Which Burned Brightly promises much. At best, from the jaded reviewer’s point of view, an autobiography of delusional self-aggrandisement; at worst, a wild mismatch between the, well, incendiary language of the title and the potentially humdrum contents. It might have been dreamed up by a master satirist intending to inflict maximum damage to the reputation of that noted gentleman of letters, Sebastian Faulks. I once invented a novelist named Julian Sensitive, whose only claim to fame was an autobiographical novel called, after T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, ‘My Trousers Rolled’. That was a crude joke compared with the hilarity inspired byFaulks’s title. As it turns

Colonel Tom Parker (1909-97) was the man who ripped Elvis Presley off and worked him to death. That’s the received wisdom about the person who managed the King from 1955 until his premature death, aged 42, in 1977. Peter Guralnick’s book, written with full access to Parker’s unpublished, witty, clever letters, now owned by the Elvis Archives, gives a more nuanced, sympathetic picture. The author is no biased sensationalist. His Elvis biography, Last Train to Memphis (1995), is one of the most serious and reliable. So, yes, Parker was a serial liar, not least when it came to his identity. Born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in humble circumstances in Holland,

Some people spend years squirming on a leather chaise longue before they come to understand, as Philip Larkin so pithily observed: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ Few go on to make peace with the sagacity delivered in his next line: ‘They may not mean to, but they do.’ In My Sister and Other Lovers, Esther Freud’s sequel to her autobiographical novel Hideous Kinky, sisters Lucy and Bea – who spent their early childhood trailing after their hippy mother through 1960s Morocco – slowly edge towards such catharsis. Before that, however, comes a lot more turbulence, and Freud – whose great-grandfather pioneered the couch method – is acutely

There is a lot of death in the latest, and potentially last, book on boxing by the South African journalist Donald McRae. In less than two years he loses his sister, both his parents and his mother-in-law. To cope with the trauma he returns to the sport that has sustained his life and work for 30 years. But when he reimmerses himself in boxing he does not like what he sees. He finds a sport where bouts are controlled by gangsters; where famous boxers dope and lie about it; where fights still have inadequate safety protocols; and where the centre of power has shifted from Las Vegas to Riyadh, lured

Jonathan Meades is, you might say, a baroque artist in a mannerist age. Whereas today’s younger and more widely feted writers think small – a Brooklyn sublet, a Camden Town love nest, the cracked mirror of the self – Meades goes big. And not just in physical terms (Empty Wigs tips the scales at nearly 3lb), but in scope. Where his contemporaries’ prose can be affectless and somehow skinless (a Paris Review interviewer said of Rachel Cusk, with apparent admiration, that her writing ‘feels contemporary, swift and “clean”’), Meades piles on the style, packing in metaphors, coinages and allusions until the crystals can’t take it, swooping between social classes, doing

Richard Price’s tenth novel follows four characters in the wake of a tenement building collapse in Harlem that kills six people and leaves others missing. Detective Mary Roe is on a mission to find a missing resident whose wife was among the dead. Royal Davis is a funeral home director hoping to drum up much-needed business from the tragedy, going so far as to dispatch his young son to hand out business cards at the site. Felix Pearl is a freelance photographer searching for meaning as he documents the aftermath. The titular resurrected man is Anthony Carter, a 42-year-old former schoolteacher, six months clean of a cocaine addiction that has

According to a 2016 report published by the World Health Organisation, Argentina is the ‘therapy capital of the world’, boasting 222 psychologists per 100,000 people. Reading the Argentine writer Pola Oloixarac’s Savage Theories, I can understand why. The novel is quick to mock the posturing of the academic world, especially in Buenos Aires The novel follows three characters, each more bizarre and beguiling than the last. First we have our narrator, Rosa. She is a philosophy student at the University of Buenos Aires who becomes obsessed with, and attempts to seduce, her elderly professor Augusto Garcia Roxler, whose ‘Theory of Egoic Transmissions’ charts man’s evolution from prey to predator. Yet

I’ve just returned from five days in the Lake District, attending the biennial ‘Friends of Coleridge’ conference in Grasmere. All the other attendees were seasoned Coleridge scholars, but I was a newbie. The reason for my going was the fact that I’m engaged in a project that has at times felt something of a lonesome road and indeed an albatross: to write a book about Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The poem comes to us with a vast undertow of explicit and implicit cultural and historical baggage, from its self-conscious antiquarian roots in late medieval ballads to its engagement with more currently pressing concerns of environmentalism and how