A music appreciation guide for our era ... Brilliant

A remarkable new book . . . [Ratliff] goes leaping from Beethoven to Big Black, from Morton Feldman to Curtis Mayfield, identifying continuities while delighting in contrasts

The spectacle of an active mind processing a world in constant flux . . . Maybe, as Ratliff beautifully argues, the brooding aggression of metal obscures a deeper melancholy

Incisive . . . Thanks to Ratliff's vast knowledge, what could have been a dry academic exercise is more like a trip into the world's coolest record store

Luisa’s bold and wonderful personality bursts forth from this book ... it’s touching, encouraging and filled with Luisa’s great observations about how the patriarchy makes victims of us all and how silly that is.

Riotously entertaining comic memoir.

Raucously funny.

A classic tale made fresh.

Lonely Boy is unique amongst rock star memoirs: Jones is the real deal.

Gem.

Frank and engaging.

Perhaps I've been biased by a forty-year devotion to the Pistols, but having just turned its final page, Lonely Boy only seems like the best book since The Bible.

An enthralling, engaging human story: harrowing, hilarious and often touching, but above all, life-affirming.

Eminently readable.

One of the best autobiographies I have ever read

This first-hand account from the band’s guitarist captures the significance of the band through his own eyes, but also delves deep into his difficult childhood. Jones is a one-off: hilarious, eccentric, painfully honest and 100% Lahndahn.

Defiantly populist ... Dominic Sandbrook zestfully charts the route that has taken Britain from 'workshop of the world' to 'cultural superpower' ... as Sandbrook rightly insists, 'we still live in the shadow of the Victorians

Brilliant.

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

I loved this book about British culture, partly because there's so much in it, and partly because of the brilliant way the author joins the dots ... Sandbrook gets us thinking about cinema, art, country houses, Tolkein, Doctor Who, and, superbly, much more.

An entertaining trawl through British culture ... [Sandbrook] has produced a book that is not only thoroughly enjoyable to read, but also crammed with as many serious insights as a shelf of academic studies

It's a great premise, and I dived into, and splashed around in, this book gleefully at first. Here were lucid and often amusing expositions on the work of Lennon and McCartney, Ian Fleming, JRR Tolkien, Christie ... in his books on Britain in the 1950s and 60s, Sandbrook has covered some of this ground before. But he doesn't repeat himself, and his scope is wider than heretofore - he notices, for instance, how ingrained Charles Dickens's influence is, still, in popular entertainment ... It would be impossible to please everyone. But when Sandbrook is pleasing, he is very pleasing indeed.