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[[Category:Entertainment|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Entertainment]] __NOTOC__ <!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|title=The Art of Noir
|author=Eddie Muller
|rating=4.5
|genre=Entertainment
|summary=Colour is surely not the first thing one associates with film noir – after all, the clue is in the name. ''The Third Man'' is only better with the shadows, Fritz Lang never needed gaudy colour, and the whole genre of noir would have been very different if it had been born in Technicolor. But it did live into the era of Cinemascope and colour pictures, and it was never advertised as black and white, as these superb images testify. The large postcards and posters that adorned American picturehouse lobbies to plug the films on offer were always lurid, vivid and extremely colourful. And this book is just as colourful – as well as erudite, comprehensive and extremely entertaining.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0715647687</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|title=The Art of Making Shadows
|summary=With hindsight, it’s difficult to argue with the oft-expressed opinion that David Bowie was the single most important rock musician of the 1970s. Having been a perpetual ‘one to watch’ from around 1966 onwards but with only one hit during that decade, ‘Space Oddity’, from 1972 onwards he went through several remarkable self-reinventions in musical style, with an uncanny knack of being able to pre-empt the next big trend. In examining his whole career but focusing largely on his work throughout that particular decade, Peter Doggett looks specifically at every song he recorded, including cover versions. There are also boxed-out features on each album, and articles on related topics such as ‘The Art of Minimalism’ and ‘The Heart of Plastic Soul’. He concludes that by 1979 the man’s extraordinary creativity was more or less spent and his subsequent output, successful though it may have been, was in effect treading water up to his ‘elegant, unannounced retirement’ in 2007.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548879</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Scarlett Thomas
|title=Monkeys with Typewriters: How to Write Fiction and Unlock the Secret Power of Stories
|rating=4
|genre=Reference
|summary=I really wasn't expecting a book about how to write fiction to change my TV viewing habits. Alter my reading? Possibly. Improve my writing? Hopefully. But watching Grand Designs in a completely different light?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857863789</amazonuk>
}}