Drugs

Colonel Tom Parker (1909-97) was the man who ripped Elvis Presley off and worked him to death. That’s the received wisdom about the person who managed the King from 1955 until his premature death, aged 42, in 1977. Peter Guralnick’s book, written with full access to Parker’s unpublished, witty, clever letters, now owned by the Elvis Archives, gives a more nuanced, sympathetic picture. The author is no biased sensationalist. His Elvis biography, Last Train to Memphis (1995), is one of the most serious and reliable. So, yes, Parker was a serial liar, not least when it came to his identity. Born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in humble circumstances in Holland,

Some people spend years squirming on a leather chaise longue before they come to understand, as Philip Larkin so pithily observed: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ Few go on to make peace with the sagacity delivered in his next line: ‘They may not mean to, but they do.’ In My Sister and Other Lovers, Esther Freud’s sequel to her autobiographical novel Hideous Kinky, sisters Lucy and Bea – who spent their early childhood trailing after their hippy mother through 1960s Morocco – slowly edge towards such catharsis. Before that, however, comes a lot more turbulence, and Freud – whose great-grandfather pioneered the couch method – is acutely

There is a lot of death in the latest, and potentially last, book on boxing by the South African journalist Donald McRae. In less than two years he loses his sister, both his parents and his mother-in-law. To cope with the trauma he returns to the sport that has sustained his life and work for 30 years. But when he reimmerses himself in boxing he does not like what he sees. He finds a sport where bouts are controlled by gangsters; where famous boxers dope and lie about it; where fights still have inadequate safety protocols; and where the centre of power has shifted from Las Vegas to Riyadh, lured

Jonathan Meades is, you might say, a baroque artist in a mannerist age. Whereas today’s younger and more widely feted writers think small – a Brooklyn sublet, a Camden Town love nest, the cracked mirror of the self – Meades goes big. And not just in physical terms (Empty Wigs tips the scales at nearly 3lb), but in scope. Where his contemporaries’ prose can be affectless and somehow skinless (a Paris Review interviewer said of Rachel Cusk, with apparent admiration, that her writing ‘feels contemporary, swift and “clean”’), Meades piles on the style, packing in metaphors, coinages and allusions until the crystals can’t take it, swooping between social classes, doing

Richard Price’s tenth novel follows four characters in the wake of a tenement building collapse in Harlem that kills six people and leaves others missing. Detective Mary Roe is on a mission to find a missing resident whose wife was among the dead. Royal Davis is a funeral home director hoping to drum up much-needed business from the tragedy, going so far as to dispatch his young son to hand out business cards at the site. Felix Pearl is a freelance photographer searching for meaning as he documents the aftermath. The titular resurrected man is Anthony Carter, a 42-year-old former schoolteacher, six months clean of a cocaine addiction that has

According to a 2016 report published by the World Health Organisation, Argentina is the ‘therapy capital of the world’, boasting 222 psychologists per 100,000 people. Reading the Argentine writer Pola Oloixarac’s Savage Theories, I can understand why. The novel is quick to mock the posturing of the academic world, especially in Buenos Aires The novel follows three characters, each more bizarre and beguiling than the last. First we have our narrator, Rosa. She is a philosophy student at the University of Buenos Aires who becomes obsessed with, and attempts to seduce, her elderly professor Augusto Garcia Roxler, whose ‘Theory of Egoic Transmissions’ charts man’s evolution from prey to predator. Yet

I’ve just returned from five days in the Lake District, attending the biennial ‘Friends of Coleridge’ conference in Grasmere. All the other attendees were seasoned Coleridge scholars, but I was a newbie. The reason for my going was the fact that I’m engaged in a project that has at times felt something of a lonesome road and indeed an albatross: to write a book about Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The poem comes to us with a vast undertow of explicit and implicit cultural and historical baggage, from its self-conscious antiquarian roots in late medieval ballads to its engagement with more currently pressing concerns of environmentalism and how

Last year, the Proms had a ‘Northern Soul’ special concert; and Benjamin Myers won the Goldsmith’s Prize for Cuddy, his polyphonic novel about St Cuthbert’s afterlife. I do not think he will win the prize again this year for Rare Singles, his novel about Northern Soul. I am glad about the Prom though, since I knew very little about the music; and listening to it did not appreciably deepen my enjoyment of this novel. Sentimentality is not a bad thing per se, but it is a difficult genre to do well, and Myers doesn’t do it half badly. The central figure is Earlon ‘Bucky’ Bronco, an elderly American widower wracked

In 1876, writing to his friend Gertrude Tennant, Gustave Flaubert set down a principle that artists and writers should live by: Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d’être violent et original dans vos œuvres. (Be regular in your life and ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work.) The life of the English poet Thom Gunn had its disciplined aspect (he managed to hold down a job at least), but, overall, it was so dedicated to debauchery and excess that it’sa wonder it lasted as long as it did. The story, told in detail by Michael Nott, makes even

‘The Cally’s named after an orphanage for kids from Scotland or some shit. Didn’t we learn that in school?’ So says Big Pharma (real name Devan Swaby), drill rapper from the Cally Active gang – one of the many characters populating Andrew O’Hagan’s vast and riveting Caledonian Road. The novel opens with a 59-strong cast list, representative of contemporary London society. At the heart of this web, spanning aristocracy, gangs and trafficked migrants via an oligarch and the middle-classes, are the celebrity art historian Campbell Flynn and his student and hacker protégé Milo Mangasha. As with the Cally and its links far beyond the capital, so O’Hagan demonstrates that his

‘If any journalist asks you about the Beatles because you’re from Liverpool, say you hate them and you don’t listen to that old crap.’ Such was the advice that the DJ Roger Eagle, promoter and founder of the legendary (and there really is no other word for it) Merseyside punk club Eric’s, dispensed to a young Ian Broudie in the late 1970s. Little could either have imagined that almost simultaneously John Lennon, over in New York in the Dakota Building, was busy demo-ing ‘Now and Then’. It was a song which would resurface as the final Beatles single and top the charts some 40-odd years later, aided by a form