Then on the way down it’s uniformly dull. Even if you don’t like the band that much, the first two-thirds of a memoir is always interesting: where they’re from and their ascent to the peak of Mount Fame. “The long, slow, messy decline is essentially quite dull narratively unless you’re a hardcore fan. I wanted the book to be a portrait of the scenius that enabled Utopia Avenue, and The Who and the Stones and so many of them, to happen in that time in that place. Otherwise they would have stayed in ephemeral forms in the upstairs room of a pub somewhere. The producers, the managers, the engineers, the session musicians, the publishers… Everything that made those songs happen.

It’s a portrait of the scenius – to use Brian Eno’s term – of Soho in the 1960s. There’s a great book in the impact of that TV show on British culture.” It was the only thing on TV where you could see Marc Almond or Culture Club or what we now call the LGBTQ spectrum exist, not as a joke but as they wished to be projected.

It was a cabinet of curiosities, containing other ways to be and think – other possible identities. “I would watch Top Of The Pops and be impressed in both senses of the word – admiring of, but also marked by, the more eccentric moments. We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general.

“Shakespeare in a Divided America” by James Shapiro Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”: And as I started discovering that, I started falling in love with the game.”Īlso on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world and Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what people are reading. It taught me a lot about myself - about the kind of person I am, the kind of person I can be, and it gave me the skills to reach for that person. “But the more I learned about the game, the more I discovered how fascinating it was, and how good it was at teaching me the skills that I’d been wanting to learn forever: how to teach me better decision-making, how to teach me to be in better control of my emotions. “At the beginning I was losing a lot of money - finding everything very overwhelming - and at the lowest stakes, poker is not necessarily the most welcoming world for women, so I was experiencing a lot of negativity, a lot of sexism, it wasn’t particularly pleasant,” Konnikova says.

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