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Soho in the Eighties
Christopher Howse
€ 25.99
€ 18.29
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Description for Soho in the Eighties
Hardcover. Num Pages: 272 pages, Approx. 16 black-and-white photographs in plate section. BIC Classification: 1DBKESL; 3JJPN; BM; HBTB. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 234 x 153. .
In the 1980s Daniel Farson published Soho in the Fifties. This memoir is a sequel from the Eighties, a decade that saw the brilliant flowering of a daily tragi-comedy enacted in pubs like the Coach and Horses or the French and in drinking clubs like the Colony Room. These were places of constant conversation and regular rows fuelled by alcohol. The cast was more improbable than any soap opera. Some were widely known - Jeffrey Bernard, Francis Bacon, Tom Baker or John Hurt. Just as important were the character actors: the Village Postmistress, the Red Baron, Granny Smith. The bite came from the underlying tragedy: lost spouses, lost jobs, pennilessness, homelessness and death. Christopher Howse recaptures the lost Soho he once knew as home, its cellar cafes and butchers' shops, its villains and its generosity. While it lasted, time in those smoky rooms always seemed to be half past ten, not long to closing time. As the author relates, he never laughed so much as he did in Soho in the Eighties.
Product Details
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2018
Condition
New
Number of Pages
288
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
ISBN
9781472914804
SKU
V9781472914804
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
Ref
99-1
About Christopher Howse
Christopher Howse is a writer and assistant editor at the Daily Telegraph, where he spent some years editing the obituaries page. He is a regular contributor to The Spectator and his books include The Train in Spain, Sacred Mysteries and A Pilgrim in Spain.
Reviews for Soho in the Eighties
Howse is Soho's Boswell ... this is an astonishing piece of reportage ... It is also a piece of social history that will be vital in future decades for anyone who wants to know what Soho was really like.
Harry Mount, The Tablet
Elegiac ... [a] sensitive, well-drawn book
Will Self, Guardian
Opening this book is like walking into a heavy drinkers' pub ... Fortunately the Virgil guiding readers through this particular hell is Christopher Howse ... Thorough and likeable
Financial Times
Howse is [...] such a deft sketcher of people that we feel as if we do know them
Daily Telegraph
Honesty is the thread that holds his book together. It WAS like that
Nicholas Lezard, Spectator
In Soho in the Eighties Howse chronicles a doomed world of poets, painters, retired prostitutes, actors, criminals, musicians and general layabouts
The Times
Like a prose poem by Philip Larkin
Daily Mail
A wonderfully beady and evocative picture of a bohemian society - drunk and dissolute, irresponsible, individualistic, undeceived
Mail on Sunday
A book-length obituary of a quaint and idiosyncratic set of Sohoites [whom] Howse describes with clinical precision, Proustian lyricism and macabre humour
Times Literary Supplement
Harry Mount, The Tablet
Elegiac ... [a] sensitive, well-drawn book
Will Self, Guardian
Opening this book is like walking into a heavy drinkers' pub ... Fortunately the Virgil guiding readers through this particular hell is Christopher Howse ... Thorough and likeable
Financial Times
Howse is [...] such a deft sketcher of people that we feel as if we do know them
Daily Telegraph
Honesty is the thread that holds his book together. It WAS like that
Nicholas Lezard, Spectator
In Soho in the Eighties Howse chronicles a doomed world of poets, painters, retired prostitutes, actors, criminals, musicians and general layabouts
The Times
Like a prose poem by Philip Larkin
Daily Mail
A wonderfully beady and evocative picture of a bohemian society - drunk and dissolute, irresponsible, individualistic, undeceived
Mail on Sunday
A book-length obituary of a quaint and idiosyncratic set of Sohoites [whom] Howse describes with clinical precision, Proustian lyricism and macabre humour
Times Literary Supplement