England is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie

Description

A blistering, brilliant and utterly original explanation of the Englishness of English pop culture in the twentieth century. An ambitious mould-breaking book on Englishness which abandons the false distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture in favour of a borderless world where pop music and sculpture, literature and film, TV and painting are all accorded the same respect, and are part of the same vision. Here is the triumphant vindication of the alienated suburban dandy. A cast of thousands, a gallery of Britain's finest and lariest, including: the Pet Shop Boys, Evelyn Waugh, the Fall, T-Rex, Larkin, EM Forster, Powell & Pressburger, Pink Floyd, Dexy's, 2-Tone, the Jam, Virginia Woolf, The Carry On Films, The Slits, Bowie, Kate Bush, Fun Boy Three, Wyndham Lewis, The Human League, Rachel Whiteread, Buzzcocks, Graham Greene, Alan Bennett, Sillitoe, X-Ray Spex, Mark Almond, etc, etc.

MICHAEL BRACEWELL is the author of five works of fiction: The Crypto-Amnesia Club (Serpent's Tail, 1988); Missing Margate (1988); Divine Concepts of Physical Beauty (Secker, 1989); The Conclave (Secker, 1992) and Saint Rachel (Cape, 1995). He is also a journalist who regularly contributes to the Observer, Guardian, Independent, The Face, Harpers & Queen, frieze and other magazines. He occasionally presents TV programmes too.

The critics raved: 'Incoming! Another cultural guru!... England Is Mine will enter the bloodstream.' Time Out; 'A weighty pan-cultural blockbuster... the extraordinary depth of Bracewell's erudition is matched by a lively sense of mischief.' Independent on Sunday; 'A shrewdly argued and delightfully written account of the English pop psyche.' Financial Times; 'intoxicated and intoxicating' Greil Marcus, W