Enjoy Life

Summer reads

The pick of the latest hardbacks and paperbacks, reviewed by Simon Evans 

With A Little Help From their Friends, by Stuart Maconie

If ever anyone could find anything new to say about The Beatles, about whom whole libraries of books have been written, it is surely Stuart Maconie who, in his many books on British traditions and working-class life has proved himself to be the modern-day successor to JB Priestley and Bill Bryson.

He has clearly trawled through many of those very same books to produce this series of entertaining pen portraits, focussing on the 100 people who in many and differing ways influenced the Beatles lives and careers during the period they were together. And yes, he does find something new to say about the greatest group there has ever been.

It helps that Maconie is a particularly well-connected Beatles fan – ever-present at screenings and launches – but he also has a deep and empathetic understanding of the group’s music and, what’s more, can lay claim to having been present at one of their concerts, even if he was a mere babe in arms at the time.

The 100 people covered here range from the obvious – producer George Martin, manager Brian Epstein – to the less so, sundry hairdressers, tailors and chauffeurs. There are, of course, the many friends, lovers and muses as well as people whose chance encounters with the band found their way into the music – even minor-league songs like Mean Mister Mustard and Polythene Pam. Often based on Maconie’s own encounters many of the chapters are also mini travelogues, bringing vividly to life the places as well as people that mattered to the Beatles. Inevitably there will be arguments over who is omitted – I would have liked to see Bonzo Dog member and future Rutle Neil Innes included, but you can’t have everything.

Published by HarperNorth Price £20 Pages 368 ISBN 9780008705862

The Last Great Dream, by Dennis McNally

Combining the rigour of scholarship with a journalist’s sense of a good story, this is a fascinating history of the roots of the Sixties counterculture, the remarkable artistic, poetic, musical, cultural and political revolution that began in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood of San Francisco and, by the late Sixties, had made its way around the world, thanks in no small part to its sometime avatars, The Beatles.

It began with a group of outsiders and misfits, self-described ‘freaks’ (later dubbed hippies by the media) who rejected many of the values and morals of modern, consumerist, militarist America in favour of spirituality, peace and creativity. Concluding with the Monterery Festival, the high point of the 1967 Summer of Love, McNally follows the key figures and events that led up to that point and recalls how easy it seemed at the time to change the world.

Published by DaCapo Price £28 Pages 416 ISBN 9780306835667

The Closest Thing To Crazy, by Mike Batt 

“I’m too classical for the rock people and too rock for the classical people; too weird for the middle-of-the-road people and too middle-of-the-road for the weird people”. So writes Mike Batt, the man behind the music of the Wombles and writer of Bright Eyes and much besides, in this paperback edition of his excellent autobiography.

It’s not exactly a rags to riches story; Batt was born into a life of relative privilege and had a grand piano bought for him by his parents when, as a teenager, he started showing a remarkable aptitude for music. It is, however, often, a riches to rags one, as Batt loses several fortunes on ambitious, but ultimately misguided, adventures, musical and otherwise.

Indeed, it’s a wonder he managed to make any music at all such were the variety of predators circling in the music business when he was in his prime, all manner of publishers, managers, accountants and producers waiting to suck Mike dry creatively and financially. Even one of his greatest creations, Bright Eyes, as sung by Art Garfunkel, and the biggest-selling single of 1979, nearly didn’t get made because of differences over the arrangement and production.

But he has managed to endure, perhaps in part due to some particularly well-connected fans; the late Queen and Queen Mother were both admirers of his music and Batt was a regular at royal receptions, and even the odd sleep-over at Buckingham Palace.

Batt has certainly added to the gaiety of the nation over the past 50 years or so, and shows no sigh of stopping just yet. The man’s a national treasure, and if you are any doubt give a listen to his typically wittily titled compilation The Penultimate Collection, 34 tracks of pop perfection.

Published by Nine Eight Books Price £10.99 Pages 372 ISBN 9781785120862

Dear Future Me, by Deborah O’Connor

Twenty years ago a class of pupils was asked to write a letter to their future selves, outlining their hopes, fears, ambitions – and darkest secrets. But when, two decades on, the letters start landing on the doormats of those same pupils, they have, in some cases, a devastating effect. Not just lives bent out of shape but long-held secrets emerging, with deadly consequences. It’s an ingenious plot, with deftly planted narrative depth bombs going off at just the right moments. You won’t want to put it down.

Published by Zaffre Price £9.99 Pages 400 ISBN 9781838778118

How Not To be A Political Wife, by Sarah Vine

How refreshing to find a memoir from someone who, for nearly 20 years, was close to the centre of power and is still able to see politics for the snake pit it most clearly is. Sarah Vine was married to Michael Gove during an especially turbulent time and just about lived to tell the tale, following their divorce in 2022. Her illuminating autobiography is certainly in sharp contrast to the recent account of another Tory wife, Sasha Swire, whose diaries, while offering an acerbic account of the Cameron government, were still riddled with the snobbery and sense of entitlement that so repulses Sarah Vine and makes her book so much more endearing

There was however, for a while at least, something intoxicating about the flash governmental cars, swish parties and lavish weekends at Chequers, and you forgive Sarah the odd bout of name-dropping, most memorably her children playing with the Obama offspring at one particularly glittering Buckinghamshire country house gathering.

But for the most part the Goves never felt they fitted in with the Cameron-Osbourne set, and found themselves having to draw on increasingly hefty overdrafts just to keep up. The nadir came at a starry Cotswolds party when Jeremy Clarkson, mistaking Sarah for a wine server, asked her to fetch him a glass of red wine.

And the end when it came, in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, was brutal. Michael Gove, having taken a principled stand to support the Leave campaign (he, like Boris Johnson, fully expected to lose) was cast adrift by the Notting Hill set, as was Sarah and the family. A friendship, especially with Cameron’s wife Samantha, that Sarah had come to cherish had, it appears, always been skin-deep. Such is politics.

Although there are moments of surprising coyness – possibly, understandably, to protect the reputation of her ex-husband – you have to admire Sarah’s honesty in applying the same rigour and astringency she brings to her Daily Mail columns to this admirable, and at times heart-rending, account of a life damaged almost beyond repair by the ruthless world of politics.

Published by HarperNonFiction Price £20 Pages 322 ISBN 9780008746575

1975: The Year The World Forgot, by Dylan Jones,

This excellent new book from the cultural commentator and historian Dylan Jones offers to refute the theory that 1975 was a musical no-man’s land, caught between stagnant corporate rock and the coming punk insurgency. Jones alternates pen portraits of the key political, social and cultural events from the year – Mrs Thatcher being elected leader of the Conservative Party, Jaws, the IRA mainland bombing campaign, Fawlty Towers among them – with fascinating in-depth examinations of key 1975 albums, ranging from such outliers as Patti Smith’s Horses, Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert and Brian Eno’s Another Green World to era-defining moments like Captain Fantastic, by Elton John, and Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti.

But, while Jones’ argument that the year provided several enduring masterpieces (he provides particularly insightful analyses of two of them, Paul Simon’s Still Crazy and Joni Mitchell’s Hissing of Summer Lawns) it seems a bit more of a stretch to argue that Roxy Music’s Siren, and David Bowie’s Young Americans, say, were anything other than interesting digressions rather than vital additions to the respective artists’ catalogues as is claimed in the book.

The central argument, too, seems a bit of a stretch, namely that “1975 was the apotheosis of adult pop, the most important year in the narrative of post-war music”. You could surely pick any year, especially from the Seventies, and find several equally important musical moments. Set that aside, however, and this is an astute summation of a fascinating, if not exactly epoch defining, year.

Published by Constable Price £25 Pages 358 ISBN 9781408721988

Also newly published…

Kicking off the the re-release of 14 books by the great American crime writer Elmore Leonard, are Swag, The Switch and Rum Punch, the latter being the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s hit film Jackie Brown. All are available as part of the Penguin Modern

Classics Crime series…

In Operation Pimento (Hodder, £22), Adam Hart recreates his great-grandfather’s remarkable escape from the Nazis in 1943. Squadron Leader Frank Griffiths had been shot down attempting to deliver supplies to the French resistance, and his escape to Gibraltar took him 108 days and 1400 miles, helped throughout by the kindness, and bravery of strangers. Following in his great-grandfather’s footsteps Adam meets descendants of the people who helped Frank escape, breathing new life into this extraordinary tale…

Linwood Barclay’s novel Whistle (HQ, £20) tells the story of children’s writer Annie Blunt who, seeking a fresh start after a traumatic year, moves to a small town in upstate New York with her young son Charlie. Things start to go from bad to worse, however, when the discovery of a train set sparks a sequence of bizarre events, plunging Annie into a terrifying new nightmare…

Based on new interviews and research, The Hiroshima Men, by Iain MacGregor (Constable, £25) looks at how the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima was made and executed, a ten-year journey told, uniquely, from both the Western and Japanese points of view…

An Enemy In The Village (Quercus, £22) is the 18th novel in Martin Walker’s much-loved Dordogne Mysteries series, and it finds chief of police Bruno investigating a suicide, while also becoming involved in a tricky local issue, and in Can You Solve The Murder, by Antony Johnston (Bantam, £14.99), the reader is invited to step into the shoes of a detective and investigate the most mysterious crime of your career. The choose-your-own-path story will appeal to anyone who loves puzzles and working out the solution to murder mysteries…

In 2020 Black sex worker Ella Bailey went missing in Sheffield, presumed to have been murdered as part of a series of killings across northern cities. Although someone confessed to all three, the emergence of new evidence five years on, and a new murder, cast new light on Ella’s disappearance, and the mysterious Finder, an anonymous investigator with an uncanny knack of solving missing persons cases, is brought in by the police. The Woman Who Laughed (riverrun, £12) is the third in Simon Mason’s series of Finder novellas; easily digestible detective stories that are puzzling, literary, concise and utterly compelling…

In her new book The Place I’m In (Leaping Hare Press, £14.99), Miranda Keeling explores the magic, humour, strangeness and beauty to be found in ordinary moments, be it in cafés, the countryside or at home. Charming illustrations by Adam Beer complement Miranda’s illuminating observations. And in The Mind Electric (Virago, £22), neurologist Pria Anand looks at the ways our brain can deceive us, and how she uses her patients’ stories, from a young woman channelling the Holy Spirit to a family cursed by not being able to sleep, to decode what is going on in their mind. It’s fascinating stuff…

Off duty and expecting a baby, Annie Ashworth finds herself drawn into a murder case when her niece goes missing. The Girls In The Woods (HQ, £9.99) is the fifth in Helen Phifer’s Annie Graham series and, like its predecessors it’s a real page-turner. And, set amidst the glitzy Bohemia hub in New York, magnet for the financial, cultural and celebrity elite, Chris Pavone’s The Doorman (Head of Zeus, £18.99) is a novel about power, sex and murder, very much in the mould of Harlan Coben and Tom Wolfe…

Henry Cole embraces the challenges and triumphs of riding a motorcycle along America’s ‘Mother Road’ in Riding Route 66 (Quercus, £10.99) and in Superveloce (Simon and Schuster, £25) Peter Grimsdale looks at how Italy’s beautiful fast cars came to conquer the world, examining the country’s cultural links between aesthetics and machines, stretching right back to Leonardo, as well as the emergence of Italian design excellence and the rise of its great automotive dynasties…

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