This is his third book on the subject, for like many repeat offenders, Rowley has spent more years writing about the Beatles than the Beatles spent being the Beatles. His competition is Ian McDonald’s legendary Revolution in the Head, a chronological, rigorous and shamelessly tendentious analysis of the songs that irritates some readers by being just a bit too much like the old NME.

This is a much simpler book, less stylishly written for sure, but factually sound and, with its alphabetical structure, more of a lucky dip: the Beatles loo book, if you like.

We learn (if we didn’t know already) that ‘Eight Days a Week’ was the first song they ever spent more than three hours recording; that neither John nor Paul ever recorded a note of Beatles music on their birthdays; that ‘Here Comes the Sun’ is the most popular Beatles record on iTunes, having been inspired by a freakish cold spell in February and March 1969 (but April was warmer than usual, and enjoyed an extraordinary 189 hours of sunshine). ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ was written by the side of John’s swimming pool. ‘Help!’ was about John feeling ‘very fat, very insecure’.

And so on and on, until you have to go and play all the records again, whether you want to or not.

The post All our Yesterdays appeared first on The Spectator.

Having a lot of baggage in Venice isn’t great — it trips you up, impedes your enjoyment and sours your reception as you lug and lumber. Coles clearly has ample knowledge but also the wit to have travelled light. Paradoxically, her present-tense search for the ‘real’ Venice, where children dislike school and have birthdays, people do washing and spy on their neighbours and the floods are shitty not cinematic, makes this more cerebral than most Venetian travelogues or fictions — plus there’s a cheering dearth of the usual peril, death or heartbreak.

Her misanthropic postman is ‘a Venetian Eeyore who knows that everything will go to the bad if it hasn’t already’; time has the mutability of Tom’s Midnight Garden, a diminutive contessa inhabits her palazzo ‘as though she were one of the Borrowers’.  A tangle of intimacy, more Tiggywinkle than Titian, Venice deserves this dose of perspicacious pragmatism.

The post Not so serenissima appeared first on The Spectator.

Topics range from Beethoven’s Seventh to West Side Story via Mahler and Glenn Gould, but although Cott poses deft and intelligent questions, little emerges in the way of sustained musical analysis or original insight, and Bernstein proves much more engaging and illuminating when he is talking generally about his ‘quasi-rabbinical instinct’ for teaching and communicating his enthusiasms to the young and uninitiated.

The complexities of his sexual life are not touched on, but his liberal political views do pop up, notably when he attacks ‘the brainlessness, the mindlessness, the carelessness and the heedlessness of the Reagans of this world’ and defends himself from Tom Wolfe’s charge that he was a shallow ‘radical chic’ supporter of the Black Panthers and other fashionable causes of the Sixties.

Anecdotes flow as freely as the casual obscenities and gushing Yiddish emoting. The most telling quip comes in Cott’s perceptive introduction: just before a concert at the Vatican, followed by an audience with the Pope, a well-wishing friend sent Bernstein a telegram: ‘Remember: the ring, not the lips.’

The post Byronic intensity appeared first on The Spectator.

But A Slow Passion (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is more than just an account of Brooks’s battles to save her delphiniums. Her relationship with snails is love-hate, has been ever since she discovered a colony of them in the air-raid shelter in her childhood garden.

She passes on a lifetime’s learning, such as the fact that snails eat several times their own bodyweight every day, sometimes including builder’s rubble to top up the lime levels in their shells. They are hermaphrodites, and deaf. In South Korea their mucus is used to make skin cream. The world speed record is held by Archie (0.005mph).

The big revelation, however, is that snails home, like pigeons. Investigating this, Brooks ends up taking part in Radio 4’s So You Want To Be A Scientist? competition, and discovers herself as well as snails (grannies can do spreadsheets too). To identify her research subjects she paints their shells with different-coloured nail varnish.

If you like your Titchmarsh and your tea-breaks, you’ll like this.

The post On the snail trail appeared first on The Spectator.

Since this book is on Arrow’s Hammer list, I confidently expect it to be made into a horror film. It has all the right ingredients: supernatural entities, exotic locations, locals imbued with preternatural powers and English baddies with posh accents.

But strangely enough, I found it to be genuinely scary and enthralling. Myerson’s gift of breathing life into her characters is so effective that I worried passionately about Rachel and Dan as they stumbled through ever more unlikely plot twists. In short, crisp sentences we are led not only into the disturbed mind of a haunted, pregnant woman, but also into the horrific world of English tourists drinking themselves into oblivion in the Caribbean.

The post Evil under the sun appeared first on The Spectator.

Perhaps appropriately, then, he has written quite a whimsical little book, scarcely longer than a pamphlet, exploring the glorious oddness of British weather with characteristic elegance and perspicacity. East Anglian gales, ‘ranting uninterrupted from the Urals’, are ‘a sight more brazen than the tree-top gossip of the Chilterns’. As Britons we ‘expect to be punished ourselves should we ever be blessed with an inordinately perfect summer. “We’ll pay for it,” we gloomily predict.’

Mabey discusses seasonal affective disorder, the Impressionists’ fascination with London smog (see Monet’s ‘Waterloo Bridge’ above), and the notion of the halcyon day, whose perfection is framed, even defined by the weather that accompanies it. Mainly, though, he goes for long walks. ‘I meandered round the edge of the common, casually looking for fieldfares and barn owls, and enjoying the way the icy crust over the mud scrunched like a crème brûlée under my feet.’ Later he calculates that the arrival of spring ‘travels north and east across flat ground at roughly two miles an hour — walking pace in fact, so that it’s possible to indulge the fantasy of following it on foot, the guest behind the unrolling carpet.’ A perfect sentence in a wonderful book.

The post Blue-sky dreaming appeared first on The Spectator.

Someone so accomplished could write a book about their weekly trip to the supermarket and make it highly amusing. A volume about her mother’s decline into dementia is hardly a more promising proposition, yet this is a funny, brave and heartening volume.

Concealed within its whimsy is much sadness and also an important truth: that the people we love can still be very fully themselves, even when memory and recognition and language fail. Law’s mother is slightly monstrous, secretive, sometimes commanding, often exasperating. She is also plucky, resourceful, hilarious and full of brio. In other words, Alzheimer’s can’t knock the character out of her.

As more and more of us encounter this ghastly affliction, we need guide books. If Oliver James’s excellent Contented Dementia is the Michelin, then this is a useful companion volume. Neither of these books present doom and gloom. Law quotes Alice Thomas Ellis: ‘I make it my business to be happy. Life is bloody awful enough without being unhappy.’

The post All is not lost appeared first on The Spectator.

Woody was born in Okemah, Oklahoma. When he was 15, his mother was institutionalised with Huntington’s disease, a hereditary cause of early dementia and other mental disabilities, which he eventually inherited. At 17, he moved to Pampa, a small town on the Texas Panhandle. There he gained intimate knowledge of shareholders barely subsisting on impoverished land, the characters and setting of his only novel, House of Earth (4th Estate, £12.99). It was completed in 1947, but published for the first time now, to commemorate his centennial.

The story is of a failed young farmer and his wife, who hate the rotten wood of their shack, the landlord and bank that keep them in debt. The farmer wants to build a weatherproof house of adobe, but doesn’t have the necessary $300. Sex is free and childbirth is described at length, with comments in redneck vernacular.

The publisher compares Woody Guthrie with John Steinbeck and D.H. Lawrence, but Woody is much funnier.

The post A hero of folk appeared first on The Spectator.

The second problem is that the reviews feel obliged to use phrases such as ‘troubling, mysterious’, ‘visceral imagination’ and ‘the man is an original, with a bridge to the world of first things he’s fashioned for himself’ (all appear on the back cover of this book).

Fair enough, perhaps — you need to signal to potential readers that if their normal author of choice is Dan Brown, this probably isn’t the novel for them. But it does mean you get no idea of what the book’s actually about: in this case, an Irishman hiding in Dublin because of trouble between his family and a rival one.

The final problem is that the reviews never say the thing that needs saying about this book: it’s a bloody good story.

The post Down to a T appeared first on The Spectator.

Don’t be put off, though, because Ironside knows what she’s doing. Her heroine Marie Sharp may be an OAP, but as her name suggests, there’s nothing muted about her.

Written in the form of a diary, Marie’s year includes a face-lift, a spate of eco-activism, a trip to New York, a crush on a man some 20 years her junior and an intake of wine far in excess of government guidelines. There’s something funny on every page.

A running joke is Marie’s political incorrectness: ‘Am I the only woman on earth who finds women vicars a bit creepy?’, she wonders. She sneaks into next door’s garden under cover of night to get rid of their annoying wind-chimes, blithely sells a valuable brooch given her by an old flame as soon as he gets Alzheimer’s and, with a sigh of relief, fries bacon for a midnight sandwich after giving dinner to a pair of gay vegans.

Witty and affectionate, wise but never pious, this is a delightfully irreverent look at growing older.

The post Growing old disgracefully appeared first on The Spectator.