The Revolt of the Pendulum

The Revolt of the Pendulum
My seventh collection of miscellaneous essays, The Revolt of the Pendulum, came out from Picador in May 2009. Its constituent pieces were mainly written to meet commissions from various periodicals in the UK, the US and Australia after I published Cultural Amnesia in 2007, although some of them were written while that book was still in the works. Apart from the out-and-out cultural essays on such figures as Karl Kraus, Kingsley Amis, Camille Paglia, Philip Roth, A.D. Hope and Leni Riefenstahl, there are sheaves of much smaller pieces arising from my activities in show business and the web. One of two of the book's early critics took exception to these reports from my workshop, and managed to convince themselves that self-agrandisement was the book's main emphasis. I don't think  they were right, but I have included their reviews in the list of accompanying links, just in case they know better than I do..