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“... of these musicians is a virtuoso of one or another aspect of pop. Yet the first book to appear, by Richard Witts, tackles the Velvet Underground. The Velvet Underground were decidedly not these kinds of virtuoso. There are confirmed music fans who can’t bear to listen to the songs considered their most characteristic (‘Heroin’, ‘Sister ...”

“... refused access.Biographies convince us by being authoritative rather than objective. The musician Richard Witts, whose biography of Nico was published in 1993, was asked by her to write her life. She wanted him to make it like a novel and he did, dramatising postwar Berlin, Paris in the 1950s, New York and London in the 1960s and 1970s, Manchester in the ...”

“... Keynes and Christie surrounding the birth of the Arts Council are turned into camp soap opera in Richard Witts’s engagingly superficial and highly eccentric history of that organisation. The book seems to have been published just too soon to bear witness to the whole thing coming full circle, as the Labour Government attempts to reinvent the Arts ...”

“... there is no real parallel among their neighbours – not that this has prevented some ‘Wander Witts’ from indulging an equally fervent passion for the Italian Renaissance. Both the books under review, different as they are in subject-matter, scale, format, ambition and price, have this tradition in common. Both are labours of love in English fields ...”

“... Man Out of His Humour; Humfrey King, the poetic tobacconist; the barber-surgeons Tom Tooley and Richard Lichfield; the tavern joker John Stone. These loquacious oddballs found a small economic niche as ad hoc entertainers; they are haunters of St Paul’s Churchyard and the Inns of Court, of revels and convivia. We have no first-hand record of a Coryate ...”