To The Last Page

They say never meet your heroes, but maybe that should also apply to reading their autobiographies. Not that there is anything a Rush fan is going to find particularly upsetting and disappointing about Geddy Lee's My Effin’ Life . When you like/worship a band for its music over decades, seeing the person or persons behind the curtain for good or ill, isn't going to change that. I'm not sure why though, but I always had the impression of Canadian rock band Rush as a very serious and sophisticated band of committed musicians, who didn't have time for the usual rock star high-life lifestyle. Maybe it was Neil Peart’s literate lyrics and the elevated subjects they dealt with far from the rock anthems of other bands of the time; maybe it was the musicianship of all three members of the band, each of them rated as among the very best in their respective fields of drums, guitar and bass, always pushing their collective sound to new limits, each song meticulously arranged with ...

Mick Herron often bases his Slough House stories on some form of real-world political and intelligence activity. Not just for realism but partly because it's hard to make something up for satire when the real world these days is going to come up with something even more absurd and unbelievable than you can make up. Besides, the plot and its believability aren't really the point of the books, or at least not for me, but rather just a framework to hang his characters, the humour and style on. (A lot of which I'm sure must be lost in the hit TV series adaptations). Sometimes the real world can be too awful to satirise and the prologue for Herron's latest, Clown Town is horribly gruesome, but a reminder - we shall see - that there is a price to be paid for acts of bad faith and unknown consequences down the line. For a while at least, there doesn't appear to be anything particularly troublesome arising out of the historic prologue, and instead in the novel proper we f...