Category: Book reviews
Win: Book of Kool – a photo journal of the UK kustom scene
8 inches tall and 5 inches wide, with 80 pages of black and white photos, Book of Kool is a photo journal of the UK Kustom and Vintage scene. Published by photographer Nick Grant, the book showcases the cars, the models, the people and the objects that make up the subculture in a volume of [...]
Book review: London Art Deco
From the imposing style of the Savoy Hotel through the ornate detail of the West End theatres to Art Deco factories like the Hoover Building, London Art Deco is a brilliant guide to and catalogue of London’s Art Deco legacy. Remarkably, many of London s Art Deco buildings still survive their once grime-covered indigenous Portland stone [...]
Book review: The West End Front
Who knew that East End Communists once invaded the air-raid shelter of the Savoy or that – for one night only – a suite in Claridge’s was declared Yugoslav territory so that their heir to the throne could be born on home soil? These and other witty anecdotes and historical facts make up Matthew Sweet’s [...]
Book review – Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940
If the UK screenings of Boardwalk Empire have made you curious about old Blighty’s equivalent of TwentiesProhibition decadence and style, look no further than D.J. Taylor’s Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940 (Chatto, 2007). Rebecka Mustajarvi reviews. The “Bright Young People” are known to many from Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, [...]
Book review: London at War 1939-1945
Based mainly on personal accounts, London at War is as much a vivid biography of Londoners during the Second World War as of the city itself. Ranging from the digging of trenches in Hyde Park during the Phoney War, to the horrors of the Blitz, and the frantic outbursts of dancing on the streets of [...]
Book review: London Calling – A Countercultural History of London since 1945
Writer Barry Miles, once the head of the Beatles’ spoken word label Zapple and co-founder of the Indica Books and Gallery where John first met Yoko, has compiled a fascinating history of London’s underground and countercultural movements in the decades following the Second World War. Starting out in the seedy bars of Forties Soho, we meet [...]
