England is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie - Softcover

Bracewell, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006550150 ISBN 13: 9780006550150

Publisher: Flamingo, 1998

Synopsis

A blistering, brilliant and utterly original explanation of the Englishness of English pop culture in the twentieth century.

An ambitious mould-breaking book on Englishness which abandons the false distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture in favour of a borderless world where pop music and sculpture, literature and film, TV and painting are all accorded the same respect, and are part of the same vision.

Here is the triumphant vindication of the alienated suburban dandy.

A cast of thousands, a gallery of Britain’s finest and lariest, including: the Pet Shop Boys, Evelyn Waugh, the Fall, T-Rex, Larkin, EM Forster, Powell & Pressburger, Pink Floyd, Dexy’s, 2-Tone, the Jam, Virginia Woolf, The Carry On Films, The Slits, Bowie, Kate Bush, Fun Boy Three, Wyndham Lewis, The Human League, Rachel Whiteread, Buzzcocks, Graham Greene, Alan Bennett, Sillitoe, X-Ray Spex, Mark Almond, etc, etc.

About this title

Review:

The critics raved:

‘Incoming! Another cultural guru!... England Is Mine will enter the bloodstream.’
Time Out;

‘A weighty pan-cultural blockbuster... the extraordinary depth of Bracewell’s erudition is matched by a lively sense of mischief.’
Independent on Sunday;

‘A shrewdly argued and delightfully written account of the English pop psyche.’
Financial Times;

‘intoxicated and intoxicating’
Greil Marcus, W

From the Back Cover:

"Bracewell's witty, free-ranging text links artistic visions of England from the Arcadian ideal of Chaucer and Elizabethan literature to the films, youth movements and pop lyrics of today. Powell and Pressburger rub shoulders with Bowie and Rotten; Reggie Perrin shares a joke with Morrissey and Neil Tennant; 'A Clockwork Orange' and 'O Lucky Man' feed into the scabrous 'psycho-journalism' of The Fall's Mark E Smith. Bracewell's prose crackles with dry insight. This is an audaciously ambitious book, yoking together the sublime and the ridiculous with admirable seriousness."
STEPHEN DALTON, 'Vox'

"Michael Bracewell is terrific (and) 'England is Mine' will enter the bloodstream on its neat turns of phrase."
BRIAN CASE, 'Time Out'

"Bracewell, with great verve and style, animates the cultural conversation. (His images) are at once thrilling and troubling and sound echoes through the entire book, until a merely superb passage can seem like an intellectual sunrise. The delight and daring in the book is in the leaps and twists of the writing...'England is Mine' is a rushingly entertaining, confoundingly egalitarian methodology, and its limits are as fascinating – as moving – as its breakthroughs. Bracewell's book is as new as the millenium it all but calls down as its last word, and as old as the very idea. Sorting out the new from the old is its challenge and its pleasure, and that is because its sensibility is ultimately contagious, so much so that it can make its readers into co-authors. This book is intoxicated and intoxicating."
GREIL MARCUS, 'W'

"Bracewell chomps through the culture with the aid of some nifty style-guru phrasemaking – Bowie becomes 'the Pied Piper of Handbag to a younger generation out of patience with cheesecloth'. 'England is Mine' is clever, invigorating and thoughtful and Bracewell's Pevsnerish anatomising of the Englishness of English pop proves ingeniously apt."
JONATHAN KEATES, 'Spectator'

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About this edition

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0006550150
• ISBN 13: 9780006550150
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256