MUST READS
Out now in paperback
PAUL McCARTNEY by Philip Norman
(Orion £10.99) IN DECEMBER 1965, young journalist Philip Norman blagged his way into The Beatles’ dressing room after a concert and had a jolly chat with the Fab Four. It was his first encounter with the group whose destiny he would chronicle over the decades.
In 2012, Norman contacted Paul McCartney, suggesting he write the Beatle’s biography. To his surprise, Paul gave ‘tacit approval’.
The resulting tome runs to some 800 pages of fine detail about McCartney’s life, from the early days in Liverpool, the loss of his mother when he was 14, the wild days of Beatlemania and beyond.
Norman has a mellifluous style and a wonderful eye for detail, noting that McCartney’s girlfriend Jane Asher was impressed on their first meeting by his ability to quote Chaucer. It is the definitive account of a musician who has become a national treasure.
BLITZED: DRUGS IN NAZI GERMANY by Norman Ohler
(Allen Lane £8.99) FOR a book that comes laden with praise from historians, Norman Ohler’s bestselling history of drug use in the Third Reich has an unusual background.
Ohler, a novelist and screenwriter, heard from a Berlin DJ that ‘the Nazis took loads of drugs’ and wondered whether the idea might make a film.
But a research visit to the archives changed his mind when he discovered the papers of Hitler’s personal physician, Theodor Morell, who treated Hitler with opiates, cocaine and a substance derived from bulls’ testicles.
The German army’s fighting spirit was boosted with stimulants such as cocaine chewing gum and doses of a methamphetamine that enabled them to stay awake for days at a time.
Ohler’s elegant and wellresearched book is a fascinating addition to the vast field of war studies.
LOSING IT by Simon Barnes
(Bloomsbury £8.99) SIMON BARNES has been a sports writer for over 40 years, so he has seen plenty of professional triumph and disaster. But it is his personal relationship with sport that is the subject of these delightful essays.
At school, Barnes was good at sport, from gymnastics to ping-pong. Later, he was a talented rider.
But, he observes, ‘sport begins not with the desire to win . . . Sport begins in togetherness . . . a delight in movement that also involves sharing things like time, space, life’.
As the prize-winning ethos of professional sport has begun to leak into its amateur practice, Barnes offers a reminder of the philosophy of the goalkeeper (and Nobel-winning novelist) Albert Camus, who said: ‘All that I know most surely of morality and the obligations of man I owe to sport.’