The World Of Bob Dylan ★★★ Ed: Sean Latham CUP. £20

Bob Dylan vs the massed wonks of Cultural Theory. No, wait! Come back!

Livelier and richer in insight than a collection of essays from the quasi-academic zone of Dylan study (with titles including Judaism: Saturnine Melancholy And Dylan’s Jewish Gnosis) promises to be, Sean Latham’s symposium covers huge ground. Granted, some of it is dry: an appreciation of The Bob Dylan Brand appears to have been written by Colin The Energy Vampire from What We Do In The Shadows. Yet many of the contributions sing: Greil Marcus, typically ‘where the fuck’s he going now?’ on blues and vengeance; the brilliant Ann Powers on physicality and sex in Dylan’s work; an extremely sane and useful breakdown of Dylan biographies by Andrew Muir that deserves expansion – the logical next step of Dylanology is Bobliography. Slightly less satisfying are the trumpeted first fruits of deep delves into Tulsa’s Dylan archive. To the question “What’s in it?”, Head Archivist Mark Davidson’s answer seems to be: “Er, what isn’t in it?” Danny Eccleston