The myths of “the north”
Alex Niven’s The North Will Rise Again is a missed chance – a sustained swipe at a government long gone rather than a sober analysis of…
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Stuart Maconie
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Stuart Maconie’s Diary: Grief in lockdown, the rise of canal-side courting and why I’m still quizzing
With no pubs or restaurants, it’s as if we’ve returned to Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, where awkward young farmhands called on…
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Bowie the bellwether
Five years after his death, friends and admirers remember David Bowie not as an otherworldly genius but a magpie…
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Edward Platt’s The Great Flood: a study of our drenched isle
Taking in everywhere from Fenland to the Lake District, Gloucestershire to Northumbria, The Great Flood shows that hardly any…
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How art schools created British pop music
From Roxy Music to Florence and the Machine, a new book chronicles the long, fertile and symbiotic relationship between…
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The return of the Black Power icon and Olympic protester Tommie Smith
“I called my wife and said, ‘Get me some black gloves.’”
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So you want to be a rock’n’roll star: how music shaped Alan Johnson and Mark Kermode
The former home secretary and the film critic are children of different generations, but their music memoirs both impress.
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ABBA is back – and so are the snobs of rock
Why should we feel guilty about knowing the words to Dancing Queen?
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The lost world of the music weekly: why NME was the last of an extinct species
For the magazine’s 40th birthday issue, I wrote its history. I never thought I’d be writing one of its obituaries.
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