Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. Themes of privilege, victim blaming, history and consequences run throughout the narrative and it is at turns chilling and emotionally resonant. Beautifully written, stand out characters and a hugely immersive sense of place and time make A Double Life an absolute must read. Dylan is a brilliant artist that has made brilliant art. What I look for in a biography like this is some insight into the process and influences that produced the brilliant work. There is a good bit of that here, but not enough. The problem is Heylin seems content on chasing “facts” and not the sinew of the work itself. The cultural scene in NYC in that era is fascinating, however, and I am learning a lots about what went on in the folk world.

Joan Baez, who could pierce the walls of Jericho with her contralto at twenty paces. Thankfully, she arrived too late to sing her party piece “We Shall Overcome” He had a lot going against him but he also had a lot going for him. Self confidence, for one. The ruthlessness artists need to succeed. And something else, a charisma that grew on listeners and brought them under his thrall. Leaving protest folk, his lyrics represented a personal iconography that we can’t always translate into logical language, filled with images and references that elude us while invoking an emotional response. In other words–poetry. She said she heard noises coming from downstairs so she went to see what they were. When she reached the landing she found her estranged husband with a length of pipe outfitted with tape.

The real people photographed on 7 iconic album covers

Yeah. There’s a blues thing that Dylan goes into in the middle of the “Mixed-Up Confusion” session. And there’s an instrumental in the “The Times They Are a-Changin'” session, but Dylan gives it a title. It’s a proper instrumental, not a jam. Because they weren’t logged on the studio logs, they were missed. A difficulty with any authoritative account of Dylan’s life is that Dylan positions himself as an artist who “contains multitudes”, positively revelling in notions of self-fictionalisation. In particular, he takes steps to evade being pinned down by obsessive fans, with a result that biographers are reduced to scraping for clues in all the wrong places, like the notorious 1970s Dylanologist AJ Weberman, who dug through his hero’s garbage. Heylin may be the most dedicated and forensic of Dylanologists, yet he’s ultimately defeated by the sheer scope, abundance and genius of Dylan’s work. There are so many versions of Dylan on display here that, in the end, you can only put the book down exhausted – and return to the music. Her argument chimes with what another female philosopher, Iris Murdoch, wrote in her essay Against Dryness, where she indicted anglophone analytic philosophy for its detachment from the blood and guts of life. Murdoch’s novels, like Eliot’s, went where male-dominated academic philosophy feared to tread. Just started this book. I read an earlier book by this author and I am reminded of his superior, snotty tone. I suppose that his research is solid. But his snark and insults toward other books about Dylan are off-putting. He seems to think he alone is the Dylan expert. You have the classic story where Dylan tells [Robert] Shelton that he came to New York and lived as a rent boy for a few months. You know that’s a Rimbaudian fancy. At the time that he said it, he was obsessed with Arthur Rimbaud. It doesn’t tell us much about what he did in 1961, but it tells us a lot about 1966.

Isobel appears to be a reasonable journalist but is on a downward spiral after some of her own life choices have not worked out well. She drinks and takes drugs to dull the pain of a previous mistake. Was it genuine, arising from Dylan’s soul? He later said it was what was ‘in’. And when he was over it, he did his own thing, scandalously adopting the next big thing in music. He went electric. The audiences wanted the ‘old Bob Dylan,’ booing him across the world. In response, he turned up the volume. Tempted, yes. But I’m not going to. Unfortunately, the sheer scale of the material is such that I’d literally have to start again. I did those books in good faith. I was thinking, “This is it. This is the 600 Bob Dylan songs that we know.” Now it’s 900. There are so many unknown songs that we didn’t know about, if you follow the story through the present, that would be a whole exercise in itself. Two years after Lewes’s death aged 61 in 1878, George Eliot got married. John Cross was a banker 20 years her junior and had doubled her bank balance with canny investments. Their Venetian honeymoon was a disaster. Cross had a breakdown and attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Grand Canal. As if marriage is not just something one leaps into, but, in extremis, leaps out of. Heylin complains in his introduction that Dylan researchers are usually referred to as "obsessives" but Shakespeare researchers are called "scholars". Heylin is a Dylan obsessive, in the best possible way.It’s showing that human memory is very fallible. We don’t have computers in our heads to record things perfectly. And if you tell a story enough times, you don’t even realize that it slowly changes. Claire is a hardworking doctor leading a simple, quiet life in London. She is also the daughter of the most notorious murder suspect in the country, though no one knows it. Philby’s classy second novel is hard to pin down to any one specific genre combining as it does a number of elements but there is no doubt from the ever-present sense of creeping dread throughout that it’s deep into thriller territory. A Double Life examines the actions and consequences of two believably flawed female protagonists whose lives are on very different paths but against all expectations about to collide in the most unimaginable way. And so at some point between 1997 when I quote that paragraph in my book, and 2004, when the book was published, Dylan had a complete re-think and decided that history is bunk. I’m guessing what happened is he started work on Masked and Anonymous. But of course it’s legitimate to do it in Masked and Anonymous because it’s a work of fiction. But to take that and run with it in what’s supposed to be a memoir, it’s clearly a conscious decisions. And it’s one he made after he started conceptualizing Chronicles. I don’t understand why he did it.

It’s a strange business, trying to write the definitive account of the ultimate unreliable narrator, and Heylin captures Dylan the curmudgeon very well. You begin to understand his obfuscation as the behaviour of someone tormented by other people’s attempts to dissect him. There is a fascinating account of his 1981 trip to London zoo disguised in a hoodie: he was eventually moved on by a keeper at closing time. In subsequent years he started to cut people off, then randomly hooked up with old flames, telling one he thought he had seven or eight children out there. In the 1990s he isolated himself from fellow musicians: those who toured as his support act might not be allowed to approach him in a hotel corridor. He feared an unflattering memoir his mother might read. It was domestic violence. There was nothing uncommon about it, nothing mysterious. A woman is murdered by her partner two times every week in this country. Eight a month, more than a hundred a year. No one would have cared about my father, no one would know his name, if he hadn’t had money The book runs from Dylan’s birth in 1941 and ends just before the motorcycle crash in 1966 that derailed him, but like all of the best biographies (except when it comes to Jesus), it skips over the early years and starts with Dylan as a youth, already restlessly reinventing his past, disowning his parents, claiming he had worked as a rent boy in New York, that he had played as a sideman to various famous musicians and that he was a bum who slept in a flophouse. From an early age he was clearly aware of himself as another, like Rimbaud, and of all it would take to stay true to the myth that rose up in him and the great talent he had been gifted.

Meanwhile things are moving on apace for Gabriella, after accidentally seeing her boss with two people in a restaurant in Moscow she takes a photo of the group and thinks things are a bit suspicious. Then she loses her job. Rather than tell her husband she pretends to go to work every day and then she meets Ivan and so begins her double life. Living between two men, two homes and 3 children. One of my all-time favorites was the 2000 shows he did in England. He did two shows at the Portsmouth Guildhall. That is a small place. It holds just over 1,000 people. It was famous for having the best acoustics. They actually tested the first-ever stereo recording that was ever done for radio at Portsmouth Guildhall because it was the best place. And so the sound is fantastic, it’s tiny, and Dylan did two nights there in September of 2000. And two or three versions are on that Japanese Bob live album, including the best version of “Things Have Changed.” I was a big fan of Flynn Berry’s “Under the Harrow,” so I was delighted to score an ARC of her newest book, “A Double Life.” The novel is loosely based on the real life mystery of Lord Lucan, a British peer who disappeared after being suspected of the brutal murder of his children’s nanny and the assault of his wife during an ongoing custody dispute. To this day, it is unclear if he committed suicide or escaped England with the help of well-placed friends. He has never been found.

Also, Heylin betrays a crude sexist view of women. They are lassies, blondes, buxom blondes, beauties, waifs, etc. Not a decent way to describe people. This is a psychological thriller about one woman's search for the truth. It's also about class, lies, secrets, living a double life, and of course, the search for the truth. This book is well-written and nicely paced. I found that the more I thought about this book, the more I enjoyed it. It does make one wonder; how would you react/feel if one of your parents was accused of a horrible crime and you never see them again. How would this affect you and your life? It seemed that stalking her father's friends and concocting stories to insinuate herself into their inner circle was her full time job. Heylin pegs Dylan as anti-intellectual, quoting him dismissing T S Eliot in favour of Percy Sledge, but I don’t think ‘anti-intellectual’ is quite right. I think it’s more about Dylan coming to confident terms with what his own experience of creation has been: the triumph of mythos over logos. By 1966, it was no longer the controlling, analytical, rational part of his brain he was singing from. A Double Life tells the parallel stories of two women, Isobel, a journalist, and Gabriela, who works for the Foreign Office. It started off promisingly but then unravelled rapidly.Based on a true crime case from 1970s London, Claire's father was accused of murdering the nanny and brutally assaulting his wife.