John Szwed’s swift, conversational and yet detail-rich new biography, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, communicates its artist-first priorities in the subtitle, and then makes good on them throughout … That’s about as fine a centenary-year gift as anyone had a right to expect.

Insightful, investigative… entertaining and illuminating … a wonderfully engaging and revealing look at the great Lady Day.

Illuminating account restores to the singer the dignity of a true artist.

A musicologist’s appreciation of the jazz singer… a marvel.

Szwed’s book offers a fresh attempt to understand and explain the nature and scope of Holiday’s achievement.

As with the best of Holiday’s music, this elegant and perceptive study is restrained, nuanced, and masterfully carried out.

This is as good an insight into Lady Day as you are ever going to get … It’s not just highly recommended, it’s essential reading for anyone who ever played a Holiday CD.

John Swezed provides facsinating insight into a body of work that still haunts and beguiles.

A beautifully nuanced portrait of one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century – and one whose place in the pantheon of those who used the instrument inside them is assured.

Callow probes in detail into one of the most complex artists of the twentieth century.

Epic survey of Welles’ life and work, Simon again probes in comprehensive and penetrating detail into one of the most complex artists of the twentieth century… The book shows what it was like to be around Welles, and, with a precision rarely attempted before, what it was like to be him.

It’s a great story in print and Callow’s passion made it riveting on stage… Somehow conjuring up all the extravagance that flowed from Orson Welles’s gifted imagination.

In every way, Callow has captured his subject as he wants him.

Biographical subject and author have found their perfect match.

One Man Band rumbles along… Welles in his middle years is a more engaging prospect than most artists at a similar point. He has been lucky to have Callow as a biographer, balancing warmth with skepticism, fondness with reproof.

This richly detailed and revelatory biography presents the most frank and intimate portrait yet of Ray Davies

Rogan does an excellent job of trying to work out what makes The Kinks’ enigmatic frontman tick whilst charting the tumultuous career of a band whose idiosyncratic but brilliant hits are currently enjoying a renaissance

This book is a good, solid, factually based read throughout… I imagine nearing six decades of recording history to be squeezed into one book is a task beyond the scope of a lot of authors, but this has been done rather well by Johnny Rogan… Excellent and complex.

An engaging and very accessible history book about our modern artistic achievements that, provocatively, also debunks some of the very icons it praises.