==Entertainment==
__NOTOC__
{{newreview
|author=Christopher Isherwood
|title=Diaries Volume 1
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=In January 1939 Christopher Isherwood left England for America in the company of poet WH Auden. This hefty volume covers his diaries from that date until August 1960, when he celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday. A 49-page introduction setting out the background leads us into the entries, which are divided into three sections – The Emigration, to the end of 1944; The Post-war Years, to 1956; and The Late Fifties. After these we have a chronology and glossary, or to put it more accurately a section of brief biographies of the main characters mentioned, these two sections comprising over a hundred pages altogether.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099555824</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Eric Siblin
I've probably read most every book on Creative Writing that you've ever heard of and a lot that you're probably not aware of. When it comes to scriptwriting, there really is only one book that's worth comparing anything else in the field with: Robert McKee's ''Story''. It's so heavily touted that I've seen it recommended by experts in novel writing – a quite different craft.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845283074</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Barney Hoskyns
|title=Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Born and raised in Los Angeles, Tom Waits probably enjoys a status comparable to the UK's Richard Thompson. He has never sold out to a mass pop audience, preferring instead to sustain an engagingly low-key career for over 30 years, feted by critics, fellow artists and a cult following while only achieving modest record sales. While his 80s albums 'Swordfishtrombones' and 'Rain Dogs' are regarded as among the finest of the decade, most of his royalties have come through cover versions of his songs. Two, 'Downtown Train' and 'Tom Traubert's Blues', have been Top 10 hits for Rod Stewart, who once said that they paid for the swimming pool in Tom's garden, while in his early days the Eagles gave him a boost by recording 'Ol' 55' on their third album.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571235522</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Pritchard
|title=Shooting the Cook
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=David Pritchard would have you believe that he was a bumbling TV producer and that he, almost by accident, discovered two men who would go on to become celebrity chefs. The first, Keith Floyd, was a revelation to viewers as he slurped a glass (or two) of wine, said exactly what you thought he shouldn't have said and cooked amazing food in one exotic location after another. After the stultifying programmes made by the likes Fanny Craddock he was a breath of fresh air and like or loathe him there was no way that you could be ambivalent. The second man, Rick Stein, was an entirely different, er, kettle of fish. Quiet, thoughtful and decidedly more erudite – it was difficult to imagine two more diverse personalities, but he brought out the best of both and made programmes which stay in the mind years later.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007278306</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Simon Reynolds
|title=Totally Wired: Post-punk Interviews and Overviews
|rating=4
|genre=Entertainment
|summary=Reynolds established himself as one of the leading chroniclers of the British early 1980s music scene with his ''Rip It Up and Start Again''. In a sense, this book is basically a companion to that volume, though it can be read independently, without having first tried the other – as this present reviewer has done.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571235492</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Richard Hammond
|title=As You Do
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Whilst he had already gained some attention by hosting Sky One's ''Brainiac: Science Abuse'' and BBC 2's Top Gear, what really brought Richard Hammond to the public's attention was a serious crash when driving a jet propelled car whilst filming the latter back in 2006. The outpouring of public support, both emotional and financial surprised even him and the [[On The Edge by Richard Hammond|book]] he and his wife Mindy wrote about the accident and his recovery was the best selling non-fiction book of 2007.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0297855204</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Wayne Brittenden
|title=Celluloid Circus: the Heyday of the New Zealand Picture Theatre
|rating=4
|genre=Entertainment
|summary=Going to the movies didn't used to be just about watching a film. Through meticulous research, interviews and photographs, Brittenden captures the spirit of cinema in its heyday: the magnificent architecture, the fascinating characters, and the audiences who became thoroughly involved in voicing their emotions and opinions.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1869621468</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alistair Duncan and Steve Emecz (Editor)
|title=Eliminate the Impossible: An Examination of the World of Sherlock Holmes on Page and Screen
|rating=4
|genre=Entertainment
|summary=''Eliminate the Impossible'' is rather a curious book in many ways, as while it goes into considerable detail about inconsistencies and errors in the Sherlock Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it only gives a cursory glance at their literary merit – it won't be a Sparknotes-style primer for a student taking a reading shortcut. Instead, it's more like a case history of the various Holmes stories, providing many interesting details, why mistakes might have been made, speculation about the stories, and so on.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1904312314</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jules Holland
|title=Barefaced Lies and Boogie-Woogie Boasts
|rating=4.5
|genre=Entertainment
|summary=Jools Holland has always come across, particularly on television, as a thoroughly likeable, down-to-earth chap next door, the kind of person you could chat to over the garden fence. This memoir of his life, from childhood in a flat in Pimlico to leader of a band invited to play in front of the leaders of the G8 nations at a summit meeting, comes across in very similar fashion.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141026774</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ted Gioia
|title=Delta Blues
|rating=5
|genre=Entertainment
|summary=Without Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry or the Beatles, rock'n'roll and the music industry as we know it today might never have existed. But without the Delta bluesmen who were recording from the 1920s onwards, there would probably have been no Elvis (or else he would have spent the rest of his life driving trucks as he did in his teens).
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0393062589</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Dawn French
|title=Dear Fatty
|rating=4
|genre=Entertainment
|summary=Showbiz memoirs are often difficult to write, at least without a collaborator who can help the writer to keep a reasonable sense of perspective. (For a good example of a readable actor's own life story, try Dennis Waterman's ReMinder). Dawn French has opted for a completely different approach, by telling her tale in the form of letters. The first is to you and I, the reader, while others are to family, including her mother, brother Gary, her father (who took his own life when she was aged 19), her husband Lenny Henry, old schoolfriends, and other showbiz icons.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846053447</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ben Crystal
|title=Shakespeare on Toast
|rating=4.5
|genre=Home and Family
|summary=''Shakespeare on Toast'' claims to be for virtually everyone: those that are ''reading Shakespeare for the first time, occasionally finding him troublesome, think they know him backwards or have never set foot near one of his plays but have always wanted to''.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848310161</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Simon Napier-Bell
|title=Black Vinyl, White Powder
|rating=4
|genre=Entertainment
|summary=Simon Napier-Bell is probably as qualified as anyone to write what is in effect a history of the British pop and rock industry over the last half-century. In the 1960s he managed the Yardbirds and co-wrote Dusty Springfield's only No. 1 hit, in the 1970s he looked after punk band London, and in the 1980s did the same for art-electro group Japan and Wham! In the process he's travelled most of the world and talked to many of the major players, and seems to know almost everything there is about drugs despite having touched remarkably few of them.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091880920</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Angus Cargill (Editor)
|title=Hang the DJ: An Alternative Book of Music Lists
|rating=4
|genre=Trivia
|summary=Ah, the music list... balm to pop obsessives (see Nick Hornby's ''High Fidelity''), makeweight of copy-starved magazine editors, and staple of self-indulgent writers (see ''31 Songs'', also by Nick Hornby). The contributors to this volume fall mainly into the latter category. No fewer than thirty five of them supply their musical top tens, ranging from the fanatical to the frivolous, via the frankly frightening.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571241727</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Michael Bracewell
|title=Roxy: The Band That Invented an Era
|rating=4
|genre=Entertainment
|summary=First, I feel the title is rather misleading. I came to this book expecting a fully-fledged account of Roxy Music's history, imagining it would tell us about their career at least over the first four years of hits, namely 1972-76,to say nothing of their second coming from 1979 onwards. What I got was a lengthy account of the art world, cultural influences and student bonhomie which brought Bryan Ferry and the main group members together in the early 1970s. The story starts logically enough with Ferry's birth and upbringing in post-war Tyneside, but comes to a full stop with the release of their self-titled first album in June 1972.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571229867</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jim Holt
|title=Stop Me If You've Heard This
|rating=4
|genre=Humour
|summary=As far as I can remember, my first time in print was when I submitted some jokes to a charity's themed joke collection. Before then, some of my first actions as a child might have been laughing, and what is cuter in a baby than that? But why was that infant laughing – he didn't have a joke he could get, surely?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184668109X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Bill Oddie
|title=One Flew Into The Cuckoo's Egg
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Bill Oddie doesn't want to write his autobiography. He is not near the end of his life, and he doesn't have anything to sign off on, as it were. Nor can he write it – if these days are anything to go by, you have to be thirty or less and have had a couple of years in the limelight to qualify for one, and not the career-spanning decades of fame Bill has under his substantial belt. Still, our heroic narrator has managed to produce this book, which is to all intents and purposes an autobiography, but not as you know it, Jim.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340951923</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David N Meyer
|title=Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music
|rating=3.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Gram Parsons was in effect rock music's James Dean. He died too young to have achieved much, but in going to an early grave he seems to have achieved this iconic status of one of the 20th century's legendary might-have-been-greats if only he had lived longer.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0747565775</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ben Macintyre
|title=For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond
|rating=5
|genre=Biography
|summary=This may be one of the hardest books I've had to review so far; I don't think anyone who's been alive and conscious in Britain any time in the past fifty years, can approach anything James Bond related without bringing an extreme amount of prejudice with them.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0747595275</amazonuk>
}}
