Venice by Peter Ackroyd
The Venetians’ language and way of thinking set them aside from the rest of Italy. They are an island people, linked to the sea and to the tides rather than the land. This latest work from the incomparable Peter Ackroyd, like a magic gondola, transports its readers to that sensual and surprising city.
His account embraces facts and romance, conjuring up the atmosphere of the canals, bridges, and sunlit squares, the churches and the markets, the festivals and the flowers. He leads us through the history of the city, from the first refugees arriving in the mists of the lagoon in the fourth century to the rise of a great mercantile state and its trading empire, the wars against Napoleon, and the tourist invasions of today. Everything is here: the merchants on the Rialto and the Jews in the ghetto; the glassblowers of Murano; the carnival masks and the sad colonies of lepers; the artists—Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo. And the ever-present undertone of Venice’s shadowy corners and dead ends, of prisons and punishment, wars and sieges, scandals and seductions.
Ackroyd’s Venice: Pure City is a study of Venice much in the vein of his lauded London: The Biography. Like London, Venice is a fluid, writerly exploration organized around a number of themes. History and context are provided in each chapter, but Ackroyd’s portrait of Venice is a particularly novelistic one, both beautiful and rapturous. We could have no better guide—reading Venice: Pure City is, in itself, a glorious journey to the ultimate city.
A Very Irregular Head: The Life of Syd Barrett by Rob Chapman
Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett (1946–2006) was the very definition of a golden boy. Along with three school chums he formed what would soon become Pink Floyd, and rock and roll was never the same.
But there was a dark side. Barrett, who fell in with a hardcore group of communal-living, squatter hippies, soon began ingesting vast quantities of a new drug—LSD—and his already-tenuous mental state began to unravel. Syd Barrett became perhaps rock and roll’s first “acid casualty.”
In A Very Irregular Head, journalist Rob Chapman lifts the veil of secrecy that has surrounded the legend of Syd Barrett for decades, drawing on exclusive access to family, friends, archives, journals, letters, and artwork to create the definitive portrait of this brilliant and tragic artist.
