Anne Margaret Daniel

Alexander Larman is the author of a biography of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and of Byron’s Women. Reading Larman’s new biography of David Bowie, one gets the sense that this could have been the end of a trilogy, given all three men’s talent and excesses. In fact, Bowie once considered playing Byron in a

On 7 December 2015 the Kennedy Centre Honours were awarded to Carole King, George Lucas, Rita Moreno, Seiji Ozawa and Cicely Tyson. King sat by the White House Christmas tree during the afternoon reception wearing her medal and laughing as Barack Obama recited the most familiar of her thousands of song lines: ‘You make me

This multitudinous chronicle is not the story of the folk music revival. Rather, it’s not only the story of the folk scene in Greenwich Village from the late 1950s through the early 1980s. Ambitiously, sometimes overwhelmingly, but always fascinatingly, David Browne – a senior editor at Rolling Stone – composes his book of interconnected stories

I had held Beauty’s sceptre, and had seen men slaves beneath it. I knew the isolation, the penalty of this greatness. Yet I owned it was an empire for which it might be well worth paying. —Olivia Shakespear, Beauty’s Hour (1896) All the Rage is a perfect title for a book about terrible beauty. The

The law doth punish man or woman That steals the goose from off the common But lets the greater felon loose Who steals the common from the goose The authors of a fascinating new look at the patchwork chaos called copyright begin their book with this epigraph from an ancient English protest song against fencing,

In Folk Music, Greil Marcus has captured an entire world of the creative and cultural development of the artist known as Bob Dylan in a single book. He not only tells a Dylan biography in seven songs but creates an autobiography of his own long career as a writer on music and America, as well

In May 2019, the first World of Bob Dylan conference was held in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Why Tulsa? Because Dylan’s archives are there, acquired in 2015 by the George Kaiser Foundation and the University of Tulsa for a reported $15-$20 million. Tulsa was already home to fine museums and important historical and archival collections. In a

On a shard of paper, some time in the bleak mid-1930s, F. Scott Fitzgerald incorporated a favourite line from one of his favourite poets, John Keats, in a short verse of his own: Don’t you worry I surrenderDays are long and life’s a benderStill I know thatTender is the Night Keats was a Romantic, perhaps

All cities are shapeshifters, but London is special. London is a palimpsest of places gone but not lost. Even as it is taken apart and rebuilt reaching to the skies, London remains rooted in the lay of the land, shore ditches, hills and fields still giving their names to the neighbourhoods upon them, and all

Hunter Stockton Thompson blazed across the republic of American arts and letters for too short a time. When in February 2005 Thompson, 67, killed himself with a .45 at home in Woody Creek, Colorado, freethinkers and lovers of his savage, beautiful words grieved the world over — and we still do. Thompson was a Southern

Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore was published in Japan in February last year. Early press releases for this English version hailed the book as ‘a tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art — as well as a loving homage to The Great Gatsby’. Anyone familiar with Murakami’s 17 preceding novels can vouch for