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Ian Penman

December 2023

  • Illustration by Maria Grejc showing books in a modern living space with a Christmas tree

    2023 in Culture
    The best books to give as presents this Christmas

    Novelists and nonfiction writers reveal the books they will be giving as gifts – and the paperback they would love to find in their own stocking

December 2015

  • Thames TV Archive<br>EDITORIAL USE ONLY / NO MERCHANDISING Mandatory Credit: Photo by FremantleMedia Ltd/REX Shutterstock (823927qc) The Kenny Everett Show' TV - 1970's - Elvis Costello. Thames TV Archive

    Book of the day
    Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello review – vividly captures a bygone age

    This memoir takes us on a voyage through the vanished world of 1970s Britain, and from the urgency of youth to a comfortable middle age

March 2015

  • The Kinks

    Ray Davies by Johnny Rogan review – the ‘complicated life’ of the Kinks frontman

    The famous Kinks songs are stranger than you think, but all this book seems to care about is how much the Davies brothers hated each other

November 2014

  • Robert Wyatt … not exactly Robbie Williams territory.

    Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt by Marcus O’Dair – review

    Ian Penman on an affectionate look at the early 70s and the life and music of an unlikely national treasure

March 2012

  • Kid Creole in 1980

    From Rock's Backpages
    Kid Creole – a classic NME feature from the vaults

    NME turns 60 this year and a new book documents its history. In our latest trip to Rock's Backpages – the world's leading archive of vintage music journalism – we visit the magazine circa 1980, a time when Ian Penman saw nothing wrong with kicking off a Kid Creole feature with a spot of French philosophy

January 2003

  • Numbers game

    Ian Penman wonders which is the real Nick Tosches as he follows him along the high tightrope of his latest, In the Hand of Dante

November 2002

  • The great illuminator

    Werner Herzog has left his fellow pioneers of New German Cinema far behind. Ian Penman catches up with Paul Cronin's collection, Herzog on Herzog

October 2002

  • Ginsberg's flannel and other stories

    Barry Miles spent the 1960s hanging out with beat poets and rock icons. Ian Penman reads his diaries, In the Sixties

January 2002

  • Just say no

    Ian Penman follows Decca Aitkenhead around the world but finds that The Promised Land: Travels in Search of the Perfect E is too full of dull drug-taking to really capture the imagination

July 2001

  • Magical history tours

    Ian Penman sets sail with Michael Moorcock's spectral map, London Bone

May 2001

  • Drowned at midday

  • A magus marooned

April 2001

  • The sound and the fury

    Shane MacGowan isn't the only pop phenomenon in terminal decline, laments Ian Penman after reading Shane's biography A Drink With Shane MacGowan and Simon Napier-Bell's history of pop gossip Black Vinyl, White Powder

February 2001

  • Rickie Lee Jones

    Jazz Cafe, London
    ****

December 2000

  • Night of the Hunter

    Won't write, can't write: Ian Penman punctures the gonzo myth of Hunter S Thompson's collection, Fear and Loathing in America

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