Tales from the Bedroom Floor

London: Omnibus Press, 2001 Why is this book on the bedroom floor? - I’m currently researching a new novel with a background in the music industry, so I’m interested to learn how supergroups of ABBA's calibre reached the top. This book is cheating slightly - technically it belongs to Worcestershire Libraries, but when I came to borrow it, there was a fault because the library has had a new database and this book doesn’t exist on it, having been missed in their scanning exercise. So this is a non-book, in my possession, but like a good ex-librarian, I very much intend to return it. About the Author - Hailing from Sweden, Carl Magnus Palm is one of the world’s foremost ABBA historians, and in addition to acclaimed books about the band, he has been heavily involved with special editions of the band’s reissues and work with the ABBA museum with Stockholm. Although he has written about other artists, his focus seems to be continuing research into ABBA and what he doesn’t kno...

London: Channel 4 Books, 2001 Why is this book on the bedroom floor? - It’s long been on my to-read list given the amount of research I’ve done into the field of psychoanalysis I’ve done over the past five years, and every profile of the author focusses on his off-field achievements at least as much as his first class record. So when I spotted it in a charity shop I had to pick it up. About the author - Mike Brearley played thirty-nine tests for England, captaining thirty-one of them. Three of these were during the famous Ashes series of 1981, in which he led England to a fanous 3-1 victory. In addition to his precocious excellence while still studying at Cambridge, he toured with the MCC and later captained Middlesex for a number of years. He obtained a degree in philosophy and later became a psychoanalyst, serving a brief period as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He is now a writer and therapist. Plot - If you’ve ever dreamed of leading out eleven m...

London: Abacus, 2000 Why is this book on the bedroom floor? - I used to own a copy of David Baddiel’s debut, Time for Bed , because Frank Skinner described it as having “at least one belly laugh per page”. I don’t recall any of those, if any, but nevertheless when I saw this for the princely sum of 50p, I thought it was worth a bash. About the author - one of the UK’s best-known stand-up comedians, David Baddiel graduated with a double first class degree in English from Cambridge University and immediately began a career in comedy. As part of The Mary Whitehouse Experience team, Baddiel found fame, which only increased when he and partner Rob Newman broke away to write and perform Newman and Baddiel in Pieces . The partnership dissolved acrimoniously in 1993 following a headline gig at Wembley Arena. Baddiel then enjoyed a second fruitful endeavour with Frank Skinner, hosting Fantasy Football League , leading to a number one single, ‘Three Lions’. Baddiel has recently returne...

London: Profile, 2014 Why is this book on the bedroom floor? - I spotted this in a charity shop. It was the spine which caught my attention, proving that you can’t judge a book by its cover but you can certainly get arrested by it. About the author - Gaston Dorren is a language writer from the Netherlands. He speaks six languages and reads in a number of others. Lingo was based on his book Language Tourism , published in Dutch in 2012 and subsequently published in different languages. He continued the theme of Lingo by writing Babel , about the twenty most spoken languages in the world today. He seems like a very engaging and enthusiastic bloke, at least based on his website at https://languagewriter.com/. The English edition was translated by Alison Edwards, and there were contributions by Jenny Audring and Frauke Watson. Plot - Around continental Europe in sixty languages, Lingo tells us something interesting beyond the vocab for each and every one. Review - In my seco...

N.B. This is not my copy. Mine is in much better condition but I haven't got a decent scan of the cover. London: Secker & Warburg, 1936 (this ed. 1954) Why is this book on the bedroom floor? - I must admit this is a bit of a cheat - I’ve read this book several times already, but not since I was at university. But my wife gave me a gorgeous copy of the book on the morning of our wedding as a present, and I just had to read it again. It came from the estate of Harold Whitaker, an animator who worked on Animal Farm , When the Wind Blows and The Twelve Tasks of Asterix , all of which I adore, and also The Poddington Peas , which I merely admire. This edition originally cost 12 shillings and 6. Worth every penny. About the Author - Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name of George Orwell, is one of Britain’s most-admired literary figures. A novelist, journalist and essayist, his adventurous life took him from Imperial India, Revolutionary Spain, and many ...

London: Allen Lane, 2016 Why is this book on the bedroom floor? - It was a birthday present from my wife. About the Author - Norman Ohler is a well-known German writer and screenwriter, partly responsible for the 2008 Wim Wenders film Palermo Shooting. His literary fame is based around his City Trilogy, but Blitzed is his first work of nonfiction. Plot - Nazis on drugs! Not just a dodgy plot in a straight-to-Netflix, but apparently true. Ohler blows the lid off the National Socialist pill-pot, exposing just how off their mash the silver medal winners of the Second World War actually were. Review - It’s been estimated that the only person with more words spent on him than Adolf Hitler is Jesus Christ. In the seventy-four years since Time ’s ‘Man of the Year’ for 1938 bit the big cyanide capsule in the sky, it’s almost improbable that a year will go by without a startling new biography or study of Hitler and the National Socialist regime being published. At t...