Soho in the Eighties

By: Christopher Howse

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Hardcover | 6 September 2018 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
272 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.4 x 15.3 x 2.4

Hardcover

$46.40

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In the 1980s Daniel Farson published Soho in the Fifties. Here is its sequel.

That decade saw the brilliant flowering of a daily tragic comedy enacted in pubs like the Coach and Horses or The French and in drinking clubs like the Colony Room. These were places of constant conversation fueled by alcohol. The cast was more numerous and improbable than any soap opera. Some widely known- Francis Bacon, Jeffrey Bernard, Tom Baker and John Hurt. Just as important were the regular actors- The Village Postmistress, the Red Baron, Granny Smith. The bite came from underlying tragedy- lost spouses, lost jobs, pennilessness, homelessness and death.

Christopher Howse spent more time with Jeffrey Bernard than Boswell did with Johnson. Soho seemed to him like home. That Soho has now gone- the actors have died and the talk dried up. While it lasted, time in those smoky rooms always seemed to be half past ten, not long to closing time.

As the author relates, he never laughed so much as he did in Soho in the Eighties.

About the Author

Christopher Howse is a writer and assistant editor at the Daily Telegraph, where he spent some years editing the obituaries page. He is a regular contributor to The Spectator and his books include The Train in Spain, Sacred Mysteries and A Pilgrim in Spain.

Industry Reviews

Howse is Soho's Boswell ... this is an astonishing piece of reportage ... It is also a piece of social history that will be vital in future decades for anyone who wants to know what Soho was really like. * Harry Mount, The Tablet *
Elegiac ... [a] sensitive, well-drawn book * Will Self, Guardian *
Opening this book is like walking into a heavy drinkers' pub ... Fortunately the Virgil guiding readers through this particular hell is Christopher Howse ... Thorough and likeable * Financial Times *
Howse is [...] such a deft sketcher of people that we feel as if we do know them * Daily Telegraph *
Honesty is the thread that holds his book together. It WAS like that * Nicholas Lezard, Spectator *
In Soho in the Eighties Howse chronicles a doomed world of "poets, painters, retired prostitutes, actors, criminals, musicians and general layabouts" * The Times *
Like a prose poem by Philip Larkin * Daily Mail *
A wonderfully beady and evocative picture of a bohemian society - drunk and dissolute, irresponsible, individualistic, undeceived * Mail on Sunday *
A book-length obituary of a quaint and idiosyncratic set of Sohoites [whom] Howse describes with clinical precision, Proustian lyricism and macabre humour * Times Literary Supplement *

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