WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Touching base with social change
GORDON PARSONS recommends an evocative exploration of how working-class attitudes have evolved over time in Britain
Stage managed: Black Friday, 2014
[Powhusku/Creative Commons] 
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
Me Me Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England
by Jon Lawrence
(Oxford University Press, £25)
BASED on the testimony of a wide range of interviewees from the immediate post-war period to more recent times, the social studies in Jon Lawrence’s book are drawn from contrasting areas — Bermondsey and England’s first “new town” Stevenage in the 1940s and 1950s, Luton and Cambridge in the 1960s and Tyneside and the Isle of Sheppey in the 1970s and 1980s.
One of the many illustrations in Me Me Me features a photograph of shoppers battling to secure the knock-down “bargains” on 2014’s Black Friday, a stage-managed event used by the media to show how traditional community spirit has given way to a relentlessly rising tide of selfishness and greed.
More from this author
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
GORDON PARSONS is disappointed by an unsubtle production of this comedy of upper middle class infidelity
GORDON PARSONS joins a standing ovation for a brilliant production that fuses Shakespeare’s tragedy with Radiohead's music
GORDON PARSONS recommends a gripping account of flawed justice in the case of Pinochet and the Nazi fugitive Walther Rauff
