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“... Ifirst​ knew Malcolm McLaren as a singer. His was the oily voice on ‘You Need Hands’, which appeared on The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, a sort of soundtrack album released early in 1979. The film itself, which came out fourteen months later, was a fable charting McLaren’s orchestration of the rise and fall of the band he managed, the Sex Pistols ...”

“... then walking out of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here. The rise and fall of PiL, recounted by Simon Reynolds with great vividness and detail, is the archetypal story of the tumultuous pop music era of the late 1970s and early 1980s, known rather bloodlessly since as post-punk. Until recently, the PiL story was one of the few about post-punk that even ...”

“... things, how to conjure up a ‘black hole’ convincingly on stage.) One of the reasons I’m glad Simon Reynolds gives so much space to this earlier period (in his outsize but periodically acute history of Glam) is that it furnishes real clues to later Bowie, the Bowie of superstar myth, the master manipulator, one move ahead of everyone else. In his ...”

“... that pop music isn’t as good as it used to be, that commercialism has taken over. But some, like Simon Reynolds and Greil Marcus, emerge with their enthusiasms undiluted and are able to explore the links between the memorable moments and the groundbreaking acts, serving as a corrective to the inclination to see pop music as a series of unconnected ...”

“... Ecstasy can create in a club the sense of community often lacking in such towns, what Simon Reynolds has called ‘collective intimacy’.From these pockets of activity in Britain, dance music and Ecstasy found new territories. At the fall of the Berlin Wall a generation of Berliners embraced techno; R&S, one of the key record labels of the ...”

“... magnify. He cites all the other clever British pop authorities – Michael Bracewell, Jon Savage, Simon Reynolds – while replicating their tendency to jump frustratingly between subjects and stiffen up their sentences with jargon. Haslam’s footnotes, interestingly, are much more relaxed and informative. Here he can just be an enthusiast, not a ...”

“... Keith Hellawell. Rave brought drugs into the mainstream, and fed a different kind of high society. Reynolds, too, has some good thoughts on this, particularly when he provides evidence of the way the textures and development of post-rave dance music mirror the rush and come down of ecstasy. He meticulously namechecks hundreds of releases, dubplates and ...”

“... and got to No. 8. Wham! were suddenly a headline act of ‘new pop’, which, according to Simon Reynolds, evolved the DIY codes of punk to ‘take on the mainstream and beat it at its own game’ and ‘involved a renaissance of glam’s interest in artifice and androgyny’. Other acts included in the category – the Human League, Eurythmics ...”

“... Stephen Reynolds is coming back. There have been at least two indications of this recently. The prophet is no longer without honour in his own, adopted country, for a plaque has just been unveiled to him in Sidmouth, with the blessing of the town council and a photograph of the proceedings on the front page of the local paper ...”

“... yet I can’t (If I should die) make affidavit on’t. Do you not twitter, gentlemen? Simon Verelst, Nell Gwyn (c. 1680) The First Actresses (at the National Portrait Gallery until 8 January) begins with a painting of Nell Gwyn by the Dutch artist Simon Verelst (c.1680). Her eyes are narrowed in ...”

“... that the monarchy is, and has been for more than a century, politically impotent and irrelevant. Simon Heffer and the late Robert Rhodes James have thought differently, and rightly so. Recent indignation over the ‘co-option’ of royal events by Tony Blair highlights the uses to which politicians can put the monarchy; it is hard to see why Prime Ministers ...”

“... from the ‘Famous Ladies’ dinner service. ‘Marie Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe’ by Joshua Reynolds (c.1759). Clark photographed by Gerty Simon in front of Renoir’s ‘La Baigneuse Blonde’ (c.1933).PreviousNext Born in 1903, the only child of wealthy parents, he first appears aged seven in a portrait by John ...”

“... would have come from.’ ‘It wasn’t only about music, and music wasn’t only about music,’ Simon Reynolds, in his foreword to the k-punk book, remembers Fisher saying about the 1980s music press.A lot of it was about music, however, and on music as on art and culture in general, Fisher’s standards were strict. ‘Music that acknowledged and ...”

“... reprinting. Worse is the very peculiar study of the court of Louis XIV in 1709. Following Saint-Simon, Le Roy Ladurie at least for once moves away from his peasants: but what was he trying to do? Ostensibly, he was analysing the factions at court, an interesting and important theme, but what in fact he does is to obfuscate the clarities of his guide, partly ...”

“... do, and then the twist into half rhyme happens with the turning of the page (that cadence is very Simon Armitage and I would guess that he is the immediate goad here). Both the humour and the melancholy of Paterson’s poem is that, for all its verve, it can’t attempt the simple thing of making word and object merge: the best it can do is be a poem about a ...”