There are, as they say, only thirteen more shopping days until Christmas. And that, unless you don’t much care for seasonality, means only thirteen more days of Christmas music. But what to listen to? There are the old standards, of course: the carols, the hymns, that Slade song. But I [...]
Perhaps no-one has recorded as many great albums as Bob Dylan but, even so, many people will view Christmas in the Heart as an unlikely inclusion in this series.Released in 2009, the album finds the king of the protest song growling through 15 Christmas classics, from ‘O’ Come All Ye [...]
This year has lacked iconic figures. We’ve seen a decade’s worth of news packed into the last 12 months but, while there have been individual acts that triggered major change, there isno obvious roll call of ‘faces of 2011’. President Obama is increasingly unpopular despite doing what George W. Bush [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I bought a newly published, 1,000-page book devoted to a religious – or perhaps psychotic – episode in February and March of 1974, when a pink beam of light sentby God explained the nature of reality to a pulp science fiction writer. It was the [...]