Reviewing Peter Ackroyd’s Alfred Hitchcock in the Daily Telegraph, Duncan White points out that both subject and author “were brought up in strict Catholic households in lower-middle-class London and both were boys in whom there was a contradictory mix of shyness and ambition. Both developed an insatiable appetite for work. Both publicly declared themselves celibate.” What’s more, “Ackroyd, who is gay, points out that homosexuality is ‘almost a leitmotif’ in Hitchcock’s films.” So while the book is “without any fresh revelatory material”, as the great films roll by “and Hitchcock refines his Hitchcock act, Ackroyd exploits small insights to extrapolate a tangible personality”. For Louise Jury in the Independent, “while no life of Hitchcock can be entirely dull, it is hard not to conclude that Ackroyd on Hitchcock was something of a quick-fire exercise in precis … For all the felicitous phrasing, a sneaking suspicion of a book written in haste remains.” Ian Thomson in the Financial Times was more positive: “Ackroyd’s biography is a deft synthesis of numerous other studies of ‘Alfred the Great’; it is well written … and unusually well attuned to the religious element.”
Reviews of Irvine Welsh’s A Decent Ride, described by his publishers as his “filthiest book yet”, have been cagily positive, though have treated it perhaps as something strange or exotic. “I think it’s safe to say,” wrote James Walton in the Spectator, that Welsh “is not a writer who’s mellowing with age. His latest book sees the return of ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson from the novel Glue … now an Edinburgh taxi driver in his mid-40s but still, in the face of some competition, possibly the most priapic character Welsh has ever created.” For a while the novel “looks as if it might resemble an extended prose version of Sid the Sexist from Viz comic” yet “Terry is extremely good company: … funny, often quite kind and with a genuine, if highly individual, sense of morality … Readers looking for literary decorum or flawlessness should definitely look elsewhere. If, however, you fancy an authentic and often thrilling blast of full-strength Irvine Welsh, then you’re in for a treat.” According to John Sutherland in the Times, “Bubbling underneath all the merry filth is the question ‘Who owns Scotland?’. Recent surveys record that half of the country’s land is owned by 500 people, overwhelmingly non-Scots. The owners used to be English aristocrats who valued grouse above crofters. Nowadays it’s more likely to be the internationally mega rich … The Scots, this amusing and thought-provoking novel implies, are mad as hell about it.”
Two reviewers, at least, of Philip Glass’s memoir Words Without Music dislike his “minimalist” music (to use a label he rejects). Rupert Christiansen in the Daily Telegraph considers it to be “robotic and banal” though many “find it mesmerisingly exciting” and Glass is “probably the most popular modernist composer of our day, with a huge following among younger audiences otherwise uninterested in anything associated with classical music”. Glass emerges from his autobiography as “a strangely laconic and fatalistic figure, apparently sincere, stable and honest, but not given to emotional confession or extremes of feeling. He relates his life dispassionately, without rancour or animosity.” Overall, it’s “anodyne”. “I can’t be doing with Glass’s music,” admitted Philip Hensher in the Spectator – it “seems to me to rest on a few flimsy harmonic devices, such as the constant switch between minor and major third”. But he liked the book much more: “… it’s a well-written, well-observed memoir with a charming New York flavour of directness and specificity about small things. His prose gets to the point with the minimum of fuss – as one might expect of a one-time New York cabbie of the old school, not expecting any interruptions.”
