Boomtown Saint: Bob Geldof

Is That It? by Bob Geldof (Sidgwick & Jackson, i986)

The reader who finishes this book will be unlikely to echo its title. Surprisingly solid for a showbiz rush-job, Bob Geldof’s autobiography could not be more personal if he had written it himself. From the blurb on the back flap one learns that Mr Geldof was ‘helped’ by Paul Vallely of The Times.

It doesn’t matter. For a journalist, Paul Vallely is unusually literate. He knows that the plural of talisman is talismans. Also he commands a deceptively simple prose style. But the rich fund of memory is surely Geldof’s own, and without too much exaggeration it can be said that the evocation of his Dublin childhood has a specifying force which reminds you that Swift, Joyce and Beckett came from the same city.
The school tuck-shop sold writing materials: