Harry’s Place Arts

Last week National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” program featured a segment about a couple of guys who have spent years collecting old Jewish musical and spoken-word vinyl LPs from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and have written a book about them.
I’m sure their collection includes several albums by Mickey Katz. Katz was a clarinetist [...]

Having read Hitchens on the film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, I then had another go at the novel, which I used to think over-written and absurd. I was especially uncharmed by the winsome Sebastian and his teddy bear.  Evelyn Waugh’s prose is economic as a rule, sometimes to the point of sketchiness; in Brideshead Revisited [...]

Can I draw your attention, dear HP readers, to Liverpool’s wonderful Swine Magazine - a worthy online successor to irreverent ‘zines like The End and Boys Own.  Whatever your opinion of football hooliganism (and as a workshy bourgeois southern fop with no real interest in football let alone fighting, I’m at very best ambivalent towards [...]

According to this article in The Atlantic, Virago is re-issuing six novels by the underrated English novelist Elizabeth Taylor. Virago’s website isn’t working so I can’t say which six novels these are but evidently The Soul of Kindness, my favourite, is not one of them.
A character that turns up often in Elizabeth Taylor is the [...]

Mr Brett and I are spending the day cataloguing our mountain of rock music books. Quite by chance, we found this paragraph in a 1964 Penguin Paperback called “Love Me Do: The Beatles Progress” by Michael Braun. In the introduction, it has a quite bizarre quote from the Daily Mirror (which, the book says, has “the biggest circulation [...]

Guest Post by Mikey
Book Review:  Philip Roth, American Pastoral, (London: Vintage, 1998)
 
The tributes on the back of the British edition of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral that I have includes one from Tim Adams of the Observer who refers to the novel both as a “masterpiece” and “momentous.” Having recently read and enjoyed every word of [...]