Wham Bang, Teatime

Ian Penman: Bowie, 5 January 2017

The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference 
by Paul Morley.
Simon & Schuster, 484 pp., £20, July 2016, 978 1 4711 4808 8
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On Bowie 
by Rob Sheffield.
Headline, 197 pp., £14.99, June 2016, 978 1 4722 4104 7
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On Bowie 
by Simon Critchley.
Serpent’s Tail, 207 pp., £6.99, April 2016, 978 1 78125 745 6
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Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy 
by Simon Reynolds.
Faber, 704 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 0 571 30171 3
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... Reynolds being properly respectful to a big influence on Bowie that other critics shy away from: Anthony Newley, a Light Entertainment renaissance man – actor, singer, songwriter – who trod the thin line between shameless MOR schmaltz and nervy conceptual daring. This is a great lost period of pop history, with its dozens of little papers and ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... that day so they went there and met up with their friend Muna Ali. They all went to Falafel King afterwards to have lemonade. They just sat at the window watching the world go by, and they discussed Ramadan. Naseem promised to come to Grenfell Tower so they could break their fast together and make her famous cheese pie. ‘It had been such a big iftar ...

Festival of Punishment

Thomas Laqueur: On Death Row, 5 October 2000

Proximity to Death 
by William McFeely.
Norton, 206 pp., £17.95, January 2000, 0 393 04819 5
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Death Row: The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment 
edited by Bonnie Bobit.
Bobit, 311 pp., $24.95, September 1999, 0 9624857 6 4
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... now facing the electric chair in Georgia. He had the good fortune to be represented on appeal by Anthony Amsterdam, a learned and rhetorically gifted Stanford law professor. His argument before the Supreme Court not only saved his client’s life but irrevocably changed the history of the death penalty in America, if not exactly as he might have ...

Memoirs of a Pet Lamb

David Sylvester, 5 July 2001

... birth. I can remember almost nothing of the house we’d lived in previously, which was at 39 King Edward’s Road, Hackney. I know from a photograph that it was a large, dark, Victorian house, but when I went to take a look at it around 1950 I discovered that it had been destroyed in the Blitz. The other thing I know about it from photographs is that it ...

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

... the movie company hiring the house for filming. I told them about Battle Bridge Road, the place in King’s Cross where I lived in my twenties, which was used all the time as a film set. I told them about the day they were making a film about Oswald Mosley and doing the Battle of Cable Street in our street. The hippies who squatted nearby thought the ...