The Nineties: When Surface was Depth - Tapa blanda

‘It is enormously tasty – a pleasure. Michael Bracewell is Saul Bellow’s Humboldt.’ Guardian

‘An enthralling guide to our times.’ GQ

‘This cerebral hyperactive tome sprawls through Britpop, comedy as the new rock ’n’ roll, the Spice Girls, “death by cappuccino”, Austin Powers, South Park, chaos theory, shock artists, Princess Di, reality TV, New Labour et al...in a fascinating stream of reactions to our cultural semi-consciousness that has voracious depth...Its insights are startling, jagged and bright. Dumbing up against the tide, this book’s worth your time.’ Uncut

‘Bracewell does “get” the essential character of a decade that revelled in imposture. One has a sense of him as a middle-aged mariner, at the helm of a ghost ship bumping its way between chilly floes of cultural cool.’ Will Self, New Statesman

‘Bracewell’s writing bristles with perception – and irony, possibly the decade’s one lasting legacy.’ Independent

‘With a remarkable range of reference which would do credit to the most streetwise of autodidacts, or the slickest of television arts-programme presenters, his sentences possess all the shine and the glaze and the amazing roll of the glossy magazine and newspaper colour supplement...This book is a pleasure.’ Guardian

Praise for ‘England is MIne’:

‘Surely the strangest and most beautiful book on pop music ever written.’ The Big Issue

‘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. His prose crackles with dry insight...This is an audaciously ambitious book, yoking together the sublime and the ridiculous with admirable seriousness.’ Vox

The first clear anatomy of a confused decade, the 1990s. ‘“The Nineties” does for art, pop music and fashion what “No Logo” did for consumer politics.' Sunday Herald

‘Michael Bracewell is the most adroitly gifted writer of his generation.’ Morrissey

Michael Bracewell is now clearly established as one of the most subtle, penetrating, amusing and far-sighted of all observers of the contemporary scene in Britain. His writing on culture high and low is coveted by every broadsheet, every stylish glossy monthly magazine and on radio and TV punditry platforms. His book, ‘England Is Mine’, about the distinctive Englishness of these islands’ 20th-century popular culture, earned him incredible reviews and an unchallenged position as the first person any right-minded arts producer/editor turns to when they need a definitive opinion about how English or otherwise some new-fangled cultural phenomenon is.

With this book Bracewell gives us the first consideration of that still-warm, still-bizarre, still-confused and confusing decade. He talks to and talks about a host of representative 90s figures, some already forgotten, some absolutely emblematic of their times – from Hanson to Alexander McQueen, from Tracey Emin to Ulrika Jonsson, from the Spice Girls to Duran Duran (yes, Duran Duran). Painstakingly, sometimes painfully, he puts all the pieces together and starts to make sense of it all...