Edited by Sean Albiez and David Pattie
Bloomsbury

Thirteen music scholars ¨C many composers and musicians themselves ¨C turn their attention to Roxy Music member, ¡°ambient¡± pioneer and Jeremy Corbyn supporter Brian Eno. The collection¡¯s standouts are Martin James¡¯ pithy, pacy account of Eno¡¯s years in New York (1978-84) as an ¡°urban ethnographer¡± and, frankly, not universally adored producer, and Hillegonda Rietveld¡¯s coolly attentive reading of the soundtrack to the film The Lovely Bones, in which his ¡°oblique music seems like a ghostly call from the ¡®in-between¡¯¡±.

Christopher Dum
Columbia University Press

No surprise to see Erving Goffman namechecked in the preface to this fine, vivid and disturbing ethnography. Dum spent a year in a ¡°largely white and middle-class suburban town¡± in the US, passing most of his time in (although, he notes, ¡°not as a full-time resident of¡±) a squalid motel used to house ¡°social refugees¡±: sex offenders, struggling addicts, the working poor and the mentally ill. The story is, he vows, ¡°told through the perspective of those most qualified to tell it: the residents themselves¡±. It¡¯s a claim that too often falls short, of course. Here, however, Sam, Mike, Biggie, Dee, Curtis and Sky appear as large ¨C and as flawed and human and touching ¨C as life.

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Erdmut Wizisla
Verso

It¡¯s hard to imagine a scholar better placed to write this account of the formative two-decade friendship between famed scholar/critic and equally famed playwright than Wizisla, director of the Brecht and the Benjamin archives in Berlin. Translated by Christine Shuttleworth, this work began life as a doctoral thesis in the GDR, and makes ample use of correspondence, journal entries and previously unpublished material. Its wider eye on the two men¡¯s circle of writers and artists in Weimar Germany ¨C via quarrels, detective novels, wild plans for periodicals and, inevitably, disputes over Trotsky ¨C is fascinating.

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Sasha Handley
Yale University Press

Feel like death warmed over this morning? Your forebears would have nodded sagely in understanding. ¡°For early modern people¡±, observes Handley, ¡°sleep was not a purely functional action since its quality was believed to shape their fortunes on both sides of the grave¡­[and] had the power to give or destroy life, to craft or to ruin reputations, and to smooth or obstruct the path to heaven.¡± Milton and Culpeper, Wesley and Locke, Gilray and Fuseli, Coleridge and Austen, bedpans and bedsteads all feature in this pleasingly fact-stuffed account, as does the teenaged Catherine Livingston, maid in Queen Catherine of Braganza¡¯s privy chamber, whose meditations on her failings as a Christian spotted the Devil¡¯s hand in her inability to roll out of bed before noon.

Mary Thompson-Jones
W.?W. Norton

International relations scholar Thompson-Jones eyes up the mountain of 251,287 State Department cables revealed to the world by WikiLeaks in 2010, rolls up her sleeves and pulls out a treasure trove of (to date) less-chewed-over material, from hair-raising tales of Bulgaria¡¯s Chicago-of-the-Balkans to the fates of Saddam Hussein¡¯s drunken bears. As expected of a former diplomat, her sympathies lie squarely with her nation¡¯s representatives abroad; interestingly, however, her book is also an apologia for the well-turned phrase, concluding ¡°Diplomacy is still an art, as is good writing.¡±

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karen.shook@tesglobal.com