Chapters & Verse

Words, pictures and sounds to expand your mind

BOYS’ TOWN
Donald F Reuter
Greetings from the Gayborhood
These days, gay bars draw their clientele with upscale design finishes, rather than sleazy double entendres. Yet a few decades ago, queer clubs and resorts employed a more direct technique to denote their credentials. Which is why Donald Reuter’s visual history of America’s bestloved “gayborhoods” is such a treat for hip nostalgia fans and gender historians alike.

HIGH INTEREST
Cityboy
Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile
Most banking primers are as dull as a Warren Buffet duvet cover. Thankfully, Cityboy – columnist for UK freesheet The London Paper – ditches the pie charts and PowerPoint demos in favour of seamy accounts of heavy nights out and flaky deals in London’s banking community.

Now Playing
Peter Morén
The Last Tycoon
This Swedish indie pop star, and one third of Peter, Bjorn and John, proves there’s more to his song-writing talents than cutesy disco tunes, like last year’s hit, Young Folks. Rather than enticing listeners onto the floor, The Last Tycoon is more of a curl-up listen. Taking both its name and its themes from an acclaimed F Scott Fitzgerald book – which details the decline of a great Hollywood executive – Morén’s album packs in some classic songwriting, along the lines of Bob Dylan, Gene Clark and Don McLean.

WIFE’S TALE
Judith O’Reilly
Wife in the North
London journalist Judith’s heart-breaking, and at times hilarious, account of moving with her husband and family to Northumberland – England’s northernmost county – is ideal reading for anyone who’s raised kids in adverse conditions.

Travellers’ Tales
Stockholm, 1851
“We stand up here. What other city in the world has a better prospect over the salt fjord, over the fresh lake, over towers, cupolas, heapedup houses, and a palace, which King Enzio himself might have built, and round about the dark, gloomy forests with oaks, pines and firs, so Scandinavian, dreaming in the declining sun? It is twilight; the night comes on, the lamps are lighted in the city below, the stars are kindled in the firmament above, and the tower of Redderholm’s church rises aloft towards the starry space. The stars shine through there; it is as if cut in lace, but every thread is of cast-iron and of the thickness of beams.”