BOTM: N. Cohn, Awopbopaloobop Awopbamboom (1969)
J. Aiken, The wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962)
B. DeVoto, The Hour: a cocktail manifesto (1951)R. Graves, I, Claudius (1934)*
S. Platt, Imperial twilight (2018)
H. Ranfurly, To war with Whitaker (1994)
A. Ransome, Old Peter's Russian Tales (1916)
I really liked all of these and I'd urge you to read them all. I loved The Countess of Ranfurly's wartime diaries, which are both fascinating, moving (the scene when she and her husband are reunited is genuinely tear inducing), slightly mad, and a splendid example of the formidable British woman, without whom we could not have run a small borough, still less an Empire. I would love to see a cross country comparative analysis of social roles played by women of a certain type before, say, 1950. Even better was Nik Cohn's pioneering, near contemporary, account of the emergence of modern pop. It's cited in every book on the genre, and I can see why. It's brilliantly funny, rooted in deep knowledge, spikeily written, endlessly judgemental, and acute in so many ways. It gets the country roots of Rock and Pop right too. It's a period piece obviously, but it does bring home how what he calls 'superpop' in the 1960s was new, and how unforeseen the next fifty years were.
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