THIS strangely melancholic musical memoir promises a feminine riposte to the Nick Hornby school of male rock writing. Greenlaw's musical life begins when she hits adolescence in the "colour deprived" Essex of the 1970s and devours the NME. There's
something irritatingly mannered in the way she evokes the musicians who shaped her identity (Ian Curtis, Patti Smith). Why so defensive? It's tempting to prescribe a trip to Mamma Mia! But at least Greenlaw proves that boys don't have a monopoly on the mixtape.
MRS WOOLF & THE SERVANTS BY ALISON LIGHT (Penguin, £8.99)
HAVING grown up taking servants for granted, Virginia Woolf lived through a period when the status of women and relations between the classes underwent significant change. Her attitudes towards her staff exposed her most ugly qualities. Yet she experienced "guilt, pity and rage" about her "general ineptitude" as an employer, and in her fiction, reserved some of the tenderest passages for domestic staff. This slice of social history makes clever use of Woolf's diaries and letters to remind us that even forward-thinking intellectuals needed chamber pots emptying.
SMOKE IN THE VALLEY BY DAVID KYNASTON (Bloomsbury, £7.99)
THIS is the second half of the author's Austerity Britain 1948-51, an account of how this country coped with the post-war years when the British still lived on powdered egg, snoek and promises of a better menu. The story is told through myriad eyes, from the hubristic to the humble, and mercifully there is not a lifestyle in sight, this being a sensible and sobering account of people just getting on with their lives. It ends with the 1951 FA Cup Final, when footballers were still recognisably human.
The full article contains 295 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
