Portrait of a Guardian music critic
We critics seldom write our memoirs, perhaps because we skulk away our lives in dark corners, avoiding the public gaze, plying our shameful trade like streetwalkers or pushers of hard drugs. We might occasionally, in desperation, recycle our ephemera between hard covers. Edward Greenfield, the former record and music critic of the Guardian, has daringly come out, in a volume of reminiscences that carefully avoids the title memoir (about oneself) and instead labels itself as portraits (about other people). But a man is judged by the company he keeps, so we soon come back to the book’s subtitle and find ourselves reading a concealed ‘life’. Ted Greenfield has been unusual
