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London Review of Books

London Review of Books

The London Review of Books (LRB) is a British journal of literary essays. It is published fortnightly.

10 articles

List of articles in the library

By date | By artist | Most recently added

Kate Bush: Sonic Foam: Kate Bush

Essay by Ian Penman, London Review of Books, 17 April 2014

A DREAM, just before waking. It's a day or two after Kate Bush's unexpected announcement of her return to the concert stage for a series ...

Charlie Parker: Gary Giddins: Celebrating Bird/Stanley Crouch: Kansas City Lightning/Chuck Haddix: Bird

Book Review by Ian Penman, London Review of Books, 23 January 2014

"There was a lot of racial tension around bebop. Black men were going with fine, rich white bitches. They were all over these niggers out ...

The Who: Richard Weight: Mod – A Very British Style (Bodley Head)

Book Review by Ian Penman, London Review of Books, 29 August 2013

IN A LOVELY 1963 piece on Miles Davis, Kenneth Tynan quoted Cocteau to illuminate the art of his "discreet, elliptical" subject: Davis was one of ...

Frank Sinatra: Swoonatra: Sinatra – London

Essay by Ian Penman, London Review of Books, 2 July 2015

REVEILLE WITH BEVERLY is a now largely forgotten 1943 film starring Ann Miller and the great Franklin Pangborn. Worked up from an equally forgotten US ...

Elvis Presley: Dylan Jones: Elvis Has Left the Building (Duckworth)/Joel Williamson: Elvis Presley – A Southern Life (Oxford)

Book Review by Ian Penman, London Review of Books, 25 September 2014

IN THE SPRING of 1965, on the road between Memphis and Hollywood, desert plains all around, his bloodstream torqued by a tinnital static of prescription ...

Patti Smith: M Train

Book Review by Ian Penman, London Review of Books, 5 May 2016

THE WOMAN WHO cuts my hair – forty-something, old enough to remember punk but a neo-hippie these days – recently mentioned she'd been to see ...

David Bowie: Paul Morley: The Age of Bowie/Rob Sheffield: On Bowie/Simon Critchley: On Bowie/Simon Reynolds: Shock and Awe

Book Review by Ian Penman, London Review of Books, 5 January 2017

IN 1975, DAVID BOWIE was in Los Angeles pretending to star in a film that wasn't being made, adapted from a memoir he would never ...

Simon Garfield: The Nation's Favourite – The True Adventures of Radio 1 (Faber)

Book Review by Andy Beckett, London Review of Books, 15 April 1999

RADIO 1 USED to sound like Surrey to me. Perhaps it was the disc jockeys they used in those days, with their creamy car-dealer's voices ...

The Pop Group, Public Image Ltd, Scritti Politti, Wire: Simon Reynolds: Rip It Up and Start Again – Post-Punk 1978-84 (Faber)

Book Review by Andy Beckett, London Review of Books, September 2005

IN JANUARY 1978, the Sex Pistols, then and now the most famous punk band in the world, split up. Johnny Rotten, the band's singer, most ...

Dave Haslam: Manchester, England – The Story of the Pop Cult City (Fourth Estate)

Book Review by Andy Beckett, London Review of Books, 17 February 2000

ON TIB STREET in the centre of Manchester, in the part of the city keen to promote itself as the Northern Quarter, a new delicatessen ...

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