It’s true that Labour lost the election, but by the terms in which the election was called – specifically in order to produce a substantial majority for Conservative Brexit plans – the victory belonged to Labour in general and Jeremy Corbyn in particular.
 
I had intended to begin this post with a platitude such as ‘now the dust has settled’. But the dust hasn’t settled. In fact, rather the reverse: over the weekend we’ve had a shit storm of recrimination and self-justification from the Westminster bubble. Inside that bubble, it was clear that the result would be a Tory landslide. Outside that bubble, in places like Leamington for example, it was evident that right from the start, there was a sea-change emerging.
 
The first confirmation of this was the appearance of Jeremy Corbyn and our Labour candidate Matt Western outside the Town Hall. At short notice, more than 500 people gathered and waited – Corbyn was delayed in conversations with nurses at Worcester hospital. And then listened and cheered as he spoke eloquently and passionately about a more just society which was structured ‘for the many, not the few’.
 
I could see the energy flowing from speaker to audience. I saw hundreds – not all young by any means – being enthused, being motivated, being empowered. I was one of them.
 
But that was back at the beginning of May, with a month to go to before election day itself. What happened in the subsequent four weeks?
 
What happened in (Warwick and) Leamington was a determination to continue the process that had been kick-started outside the Town Hall. Over the next four weeks, we continued to be enthused and motivated by a candidate who reflected our views and needs in his policies, in his personality, in his work ethic.
 
Matt Western overcame a Conservative majority of 6,606 to win Warwick and Leamington. He took 46.7% of the vote. He did not achieve this extraordinary result because the Tory Chris White was a poor candidate. (He wasn’t and isn’t, despite sometimes struggling to justify many policies in the Tory manifesto.) Matt won because he perfectly articulated the Labour vision, explaining the specifics of the Labour manifesto and relating them to our community. As many of us have known for some time, he was the ideal candidate for the party, the constituency and the times.
 
As I write this, Matt is on his way to London to pick up the pieces, to find a desk from which to work and to be initiated into the bizarre rituals of the House of Commons. Once established, I know that he will focus on representing Warwick and Leamington in Westminster, rather than Westminster in Warwick and Leamington, arguing for a fairer society and fighting for a Brexit solution which more closely reflects the remain views of his constituents.
 
Meanwhile, the hundreds of us who were enthused and engaged by his campaign will continue to build on what he has achieved over this short, sharp ‘snap’ election, what Matt called 'a roller-coaster ride'.

We can relish this victory, but it is only one skirmish in a continuing struggle to build a society for the many, not the few.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Mickey and The Hartbeats from 10.10.1968 at The Matrix Coffeehouse in San Francisco. This is of course the Dead - without Weir and Pigpen - but this show and a couple or three others at the same venue include some of the most exploratory, spacey and intriguing improvisational jams ever. Chansons sans paroles.

As a poll this morning indicates the likelihood of a hung Parliament, and the personal attacks on Jeremy Corbyn become ever more abusive and nonsensical, Theresa May is pitching herself as a superior Brexit negotiator. As someone who struggles to negotiate effectively with my wine merchant, I thought I would take advice from an expert - ex-Ambassador Craig Murray, a man trained in the fine art of diplomacy and with a proven record of success in complex negotiations, on this key issue. This is his judgement.

​"Frankly, if I had the choice between sending in Jeremy Corbyn, with his politeness and reasonableness, or Theresa May, into a negotiation I would not hesitate for a second in choosing Corbyn. I am quite sure there is not another diplomat in the World who would make a different choice. May’s flakiness and intolerance of disagreement represent a disaster waiting to happen."

"All of which underlines a thought that has been pulling at me ever since the election started. May has continually tried to pitch this as a question of who you would wish to act as the negotiator of Brexit, either her or Jeremy Corbyn. But why would anybody believe that a woman who is not even capable to debate with her opponents would be a good negotiator?

In fact she would be an appalling negotiator. She becomes completely closed off when contradicted. She is incapable of thinking on her feet. She is undoubtedly the worst performer at Prime Minister’s Questions, either for government or opposition, since they were first broadcast. Why on earth would anybody think she would be a good negotiator? As soon as Michel Barnier made a point she was not expecting across the table, she would switch off and revert to cliché, and probably give off a great deal of hostility too.

The delusion she would negotiate well has been fed by the media employing all kinds of completely inappropriate metaphors for the Brexit negotiations. From metaphors of waging war to metaphors of playing poker, they all characterise the process as binary and aggressive.

In fact – and I speak as somebody who has undertaken very serious international negotiations, including of the UK maritime boundaries and as the Head of UK Delegation to the Sierra Leone Peace Talks – intenational negotiation is the opposite. It is a cooperative process and not a confrontational process. Almost all negotiations cover a range of points, and they work on the basis of you give a bit there, and I give a bit here. Each side has its bottom lines, subjects on which it cannot move at all or move but to a limited degree. Sometimes on a single subject two “bottom lines” can be in direct conflict. Across the whole range of thousands of subjects, you are trying to find a solution all can live with.

So empathy with your opposite number is a key requirement in a skilled negotiator, and everything I have ever seen about Theresa May marks her out as perhaps having less emotional intelligence than anybody I have ever observed. Bonhommie is also important. Genuine friendship can be a vital factor in reaching agreement, and it can happen in unexpected ways. But May has never been able to strike up friendships outside of a social circle limited to a very particular segment of English society, excluding the vast majority of the English, let alone Scots and heaven forfend continentals. The best negotiators have affability, or at least the ability to switch it on. It is a vital tool.

That is not to say occasionally you do not have to speak and stare hard to make plain that one of your bottom lines is real. But that is by no means the norm. And you need the intelligence and sharpness to carry it off, which May does not. That is one of the many differences between May and Thatcher.

Frankly, if I had the choice between sending in Jeremy Corbyn, with his politeness and reasonableness, or Theresa May, into a negotiation I would not hesitate for a second in choosing Corbyn. I am quite sure there is not another diplomat in the World who would make a different choice. May’s flakiness and intolerance of disagreement represent a disaster waiting to happen."

Today from the everysmith vaults: The extraordinary new release from the Dead of four shows from May 1977 plus a couple of quality audience tapes of the Bob shows we attended a few weeks ago - at the London Palladium and Bournemouth.  

When Theresa May announced her ‘snap’ election, we were a dozen games into the season with the Sox riddled with with ‘flu-like symptoms’ and bereavements; but we had still managed a respectable if Priceless start to the season.
 
Inevitably, the decision to call an election changed my plans for April, May and June. I had scheduled some late nights with the Sox on mlb.tv interspersed by a few trips to see Bob on the UK leg of the current European tour.
 
I am on schedule with this, taking in the excellent series against the Cubs and the less than excellent series against the Yankees, together with – the highlight of the last few months - a show at the London Palladium in which Bob was playful and passionate, full of energy and irony.
 
I was fortunate enough to be close to the front and right in Bob’s eyeline as he sat at his baby grand piano, which he treated as if it were a battered upright in a public bar.

Jill and I are heading to Bournemouth – “I married Isis on the fifth day of May” – to see him again at the end of this week, when and where we hope the weather holds and we are able, as we did the last time Bob played Bournemouth, to walk along the beach after the show and eat crab sandwiches, washed down with a glass of Sauvignon, silhouetted by the sea and very probably with one hand waving free.
 
If all this sounds idyllic, and it has been and will be, we mustn’t forget that the country is currently in crisis. My days have been preoccupied with politics – leafleting, talking, discussing and arguing about the future.
 
I think that we have reached the pits as far as political debate is concerned, with the Tory campaign reduced to personal abuse of Corbyn and robotic reiterations of the nonsensical phrase ‘strong and stable government’ when they are clearly being neither strong nor stable and governing only in name.
 
Their refusal to discuss policy or take on their opponents, and the refusal of the mainstream press to report this or hold them to account, is not merely a cause for concern, but a denial of democracy. Just thinking about it keeps me awake at night.
 
But being awake at night allows me to watch the Sox.
 
Despite the games against Detroit, each of which could easily have gone the other way, and the Yankees, we are, as I write at the beginning of May, only a game back from where were this time last year. There is much about which to take heart: the unsupported pitching of Sale and Porcello and the emergence of Eddie Rodriguez. There is, of course, an equal number of problems., particularly Wright. When a knuckleballer loses it, he loses it big time and that is happening with Wright – I hope tonight proves me wrong.
 
But the big issue is the hitting.

We are miles away from the production of last year and we have no Papi to bail us out of the slump. But we are playing a new game, a National League game, and managing to get on base regularly and frequently. The runs will surely come. The wins will surely come. And from hovering just over the .500 mark, we will be right up there by the end of this month.
 
Keep the faith.
 
In music, in politics, in baseball, what goes around, comes around.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Bob - but not Triplicate, which I’m afraid is proof that one can have too much of a good thing. From my speakers, I am hearing 1975 Rolling Thunder. In my head, I am listening to this newly animated manifestation of a Bob who, remarkably, celebrates his 76th birthday in three weeks but is performing with the same energy as he showed us back in the '60s.

Yes, I know I promised to talk baseball this time, and I will very soon; but the season is only a couple of games in (Sox 2 for 2)  and right now I have to tell you about a couple of wonderful Sunday performances that I’ve been fortunate enough to witness in the last couple of weeks: first, Bach's St Matthew Passion and, a week later, Coventry City’s first appearance at Wembley since 1987.
 
For many years, in a different lifetime, Good Friday was the day on which Jill and I would schlep to Birmingham's magnificent Symphony Hall to see and hear this combination of religious mass and secular opera performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, with Willard White (now Sir Willlard White) as Christus. The sheer brilliance of the CBSO, rigorously rehearsed by Simon Rattle (now Sir Simon Rattle), the superb acoustics of the hall itself, and the power of the Symphony Hall organ (featuring a couple of pipes donated by everysmith – a different lifetime indeed!) made these afternoons among the highlights of my extensive experience of live music: right up there with Dylan in 1966, Kyril Kondrashin and the Leningrad Philharmonic in 1971 and the the Dead in 1972.
 
So when it was announced that the Armonico Consort & Baroque Orchestra directed by Christopher Monks was to perform the Passion on period instruments and that Ian Bostridge was to sing the role of evangelist, there was no doubt where we would be between 3pm and 6pm. We were not disappointed. Fortified with a glass of indifferent Chilean Merlot, we were transfixed - is that the right word for a performance of the Passion? – by an extraordinary performance, closer to what one suspects was the original sound than the power and magnificence of those Symphony Hall concerts.
 
Not necessarily better, but different in kind, in style, in its religiosity.

And there was a similar sense of religious fervour the following week, when I was one of more than 43,000 Coventry City supporters travelling to London on a pilgrimage in search of salvation from a season, indeed a decade, of disappointment.
 
It was a wonderful experience, although stressful in the extreme. Only the goals and the final whistle provided exhilaration. But we did it. And the joy in the City half of the ground – rather more than half actually – was palpable.
 
Owners SISU have destroyed the club, in the search for mammon, but Sunday showed that there is still a Coventry City Football Club and it exists in the hearts and minds of those players and those 43,000 fans.
 
It’s a broad church and its breadth and depth will not be diminished nor destroyed by a hedge fund.

​My special commemorative scarf has been passed to my grandson, who wears it with pride. He’s only 6. But quasi cursores vitae lampada tradunt.


Today from the everysmith vaults: A show from last year, at Asbury Park NJ, featuring members of the Dead and Airplane families, including children of the original bands. Another wonderful example of the torch being passed. 

Who would have thought that a referendum could be “divisive” and “cause huge economic uncertainty”?
 
Those are the terms used by Theresa May to describe a second referendum on the issue of Scottish independence. It is of course completely different from the Brexit referendum which was clearly and unequivocally “decisive”; not to mention “the will of the people”, and certainly not to mention “a clear mandate”.
 
As anyone who saw me punching the air as England scored their final try against the hapless Scots last Saturday will confirm, I am English (albeit with a weird mélange of international DNA). But as the shambles of the Brexit process unfolds, Nicola Sturgeon’s announcement yesterday gave me hope.
 
Is it, as our Prime Minister stated, “playing politics”? Or is it a perfectly reasonable response to what is going on in Downing Street and Parliament?
 
It’s the latter. Because, as that exceptional woman Mhairi Black, our youngest MP, has claimed, Westminster is “depressing”, “a waste of time”, “so old and defunct in terms of its systems and procedures”. It can drag down the best of us and raise to the heights the worst of us.
 
In my last post, I remarked that Corbyn is devolving from a man of principle into a politician. Black has intimated that she will not stand again: she is apprehensive about becoming institutionalized or helpless. This, I fear, is happening to Corbyn. 
 
No, Mrs May, politics is a game, and Corbyn and so many others are being forced to play it.

In this parliamentary hangover from the worst of the public school system, games are compulsory.
 
I suspect and hope that Nicola Sturgeon’s determination to allow the Scottish people an opportunity to remain in the EU is the equivalent of the apocryphal action of William Webb Ellis at Rugby School back in 1823.
 
I believe it demonstrates “a fine disregard for the rules of the game”.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I'm listening to an old (1967) John Peel show, featuring Pink Floyd, a band by which I have never been totally convinced, even though they played a great free show for The 1/- Paper at the Cambridge Corn Exchange in ... probably '68 or '69. Anyway, in the middle of the show, randomly, Peel plays a great song called The Red Sox Are Winning by a band called Earth Opera. There's some stuff on YouTube. Anyone got anything else? They're good.

Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if, back in January, at the moment when Trump was raising his hand to take the oath of office, a Supreme Court justice or even Faye Dunaway had rushed down the steps of the Capitol and announced: ‘Sorry, there’s been a mistake’? Clinton won the popular vote by a couple of million, he or she would say. Trump is here under false pretences.
 
Last night, the Academy was quickly able to recognize, acknowledge and put right its mistake at a cost of a little embarrassment. Other, more important issues, are less easily rectified.
 
Southampton fans may point to their team’s disallowed goal at Wembley yesterday, a clearly erroneous decision by the linesman. But it is the Brexit referendum which is the clear parallel.
 
As a remainer and, yes, a remoaner also, it seems to me eminently sensible that there should be a second referendum when the results of the Tory negotiations are made clear, if they ever become so. This is not merely because my side lost, but because the subsequent machinations of the various political parties have made the 48% of those who voted without any effective representation on what is surely the overarching issue de nos jours. Merely a handful of Liberal Democrats, who were part of the coalition which approved the referendum, remain in the remain corner.
 
In our much vaunted parliamentary democracy, Labour and Tory are united in voting for Article 50 in the full knowledge of how this is being taken as a mandate for policies which had not been mentioned, unless specifically denied, during the referendum campaign.
 
And, reluctantly, I blame Corbyn.
 
The three-line whip which he imposed on his party, the majority of which are also in the remain camp, was an uncharacteristic decision by a man who is principled or nothing. His abrupt transformation into a Mandelsonian Machiavel, concerned with the minutiae of political wheeling and dealing in what we used to call smoke-filled rooms is not solely regrettable. He is no longer a man of principle, but a politician: exactly the reverse of why we voted him for in the first place.
 
Had he stood in the Commons and announced a free vote, he would have not only prevented the resignations of several members of the Shadow Cabinet and the unfortunate migraine of Dianne Abbott, but also applied moral pressure on May to allow her own MPs (the majority of whom are also remainers) similar freedom. We might even have seen our local Tory MP, Chris White – who is a remainer representing a constituency which voted to remain – casting his vote in accord with the will of his constituents.
 
Parliament would then be truly ‘representative’ of the people.
 
But it’s too late now. Too late even to apply moral pressure. Too late even for him to stick to his principles.
 
“These are my principles, and if you don’t like them, I have others.”
 
I despair.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I am listening to The 13 Most Beautiful: Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests by Dean & Britta. I have two versions: the album itself and a live show at the Y, Philadelphia recorded by those wonderful folk at nyctaper. You will not be surprised to hear that I prefer the show. But both are worthy of your close attention.

As I write this, I am recovering from watching the Patriots come back from a 25 point deficit in the Super Bowl. So wretched was our first half performance that I nearly took to my bed when Lady Gaga appeared. I’m glad I didn’t. I saw the football equivalent of the Mothers’ Day Miracle at Fenway, back in 2007. Actually, greater and more memorable than that, because it took place in the super-charged atmosphere of the Super Bowl.
 
Until the game started at 23.30 UK time last night, however, I was following with relish the social media discussions about the political opinions of the principal characters in the club.
 
One might expect owner Robert Kraft and coach Bill Belichick, who actually resembles Steve Bannon both physically and in his controlling and manipulative approach to the world, to espouse Trumpist prejudices.

I did not, however, expect to read that MVP, GOAT and super-hero Tom Brady was not merely a supporter of Trump, but a friend and golfing buddy of the ‘so-called’ President.
 
How does this news affect my view of Brady? Does it devalue his achievements on the field?
 
For that matter, to what extent does Curt Schilling’s politics affect his chances of the Hall of Fame?

More importantly – or is it? - how does T.S. Eliot’s anti-semitism force us to re-think our admiration for his work as poet and seminal critic? Can we read Heidegger without thinking that this man joined the Nazi party? Or Sartre without remembering his early support for Stalin and later flirtation with Maoism?
 
Clearly, these cases are different from the sports examples: Eliot’s anti-semitism was part of his work; Heidegger’s thinking drove him (though not inexorably) to fascism; Sartre tried desperately to reconcile his existential commitment to individual freedom with a Marxist focus on society: he was only too aware of the contradictions.
 
But Brady? Schilling? Their politics have nothing to do with their on-field achievements. For the record, I voted for Schilling in the IBWAA HoF ballot on the basis that he might be a vile right-wing Republican shit, but he was our vile right-wing Republican shit and his record and bloodied sock justify inclusion in Cooperstown. And given the opportunity I would vote early and often for Brady too. He has overcome the egregious bias of Commissioner Roger Goodell, a four match ban and a 25 point deficit to cement his position in the stratosphere of the NFL.
 
And after a couple of hours sleep, right now I don’t care that he supports Trump.

As far as I’m concerned, he can do pretty much whatever he wants.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: The great Michael Chapman is celebrating 50 years on the road with a new album, but I’m listening to the re-mastered Fully Qualified Survivor, originally from 1970.
 
Today from the everysmith shelves:  I read Rick Gekoski’s brilliant first novel, Darke, in proof form last year. I am now re-reading the published novel - it came out last Wednesday. Not aware of any significant changes, but a second reading is revealing new treasures and depths. I really cannot recommend this highly enough.

Whatever else 2016 threw at us, in this household we shall remember it as the year when we welcomed three new grandchildren: Cleo Donfrancesco, Leo Voce and River Linforth.

We saw them all over Christmas, together with their siblings and cousins, and the seven of them, and their parents, gave us great joy and innumerable reasons to look forward rather than back.
 
Don’t Look Back is good advice on this first day of the new post-truth year, as Jill prepares to fly to Ireland to celebrate the all-too-short life of the life-enhancing Susie Shepherd; whose death was for us the final throe of what has been a wretched year in so many respects.

There is enough out there (some of it from my pen) about Brexit and Trump and Syria and the rise of the right and the terrible and continuing (another in Istanbul last night) attacks on us all.
 
Although in the wee small hours I do, I am not going to dwell on them in this post; rather, I am resolved to look for - and forward to - a year which will bring us some measure of catharsis.
 
I am looking forward to taking down the Christmas tree and its associated baubles tomorrow.

I am looking forward to eating truffles in Uzès in a couple of weeks.
 
I am looking forward to celebrating my mother’s 90th birthday and meeting some long-lost cousins in March.
 
I am looking forward to seeing and hearing Dylan in May.
 
I am looking forward to reading new books, to drinking some new wines and listening to new music.
 
I am looking forward to completing a novel, one chapter of which I have been grappling with for some years.

I am looking forward to helping overcome hatred and bigotry.
 
And I am looking forward to a new baseball season and finding out if it is true that it’s all about the pitching. Because if it is so, then the Sox might just take another Series.

But most of all, I am looking forward to spending another year with the grandchildren.
 
These are small things, perhaps, in the great disorder of things. But they will help (me at least) to purge the emotions evoked by the desperate state of our world: a catharsis of sorts.
 
Yes, I believe in history. But history to the defeated may say alas, but cannot help or pardon.
 
It’s probably getting there, but so long as the kids are well and happy and healthy, it’s not dark yet.

Happy New Year.

​The year started well. Back in January, we had a new novel by Julian Barnes and a new book about Shostakovich. In this household, either or both would be welcomed, but this was two-in-one. Barnes had applied his meticulous research, sensitivity and beautiful prose to the life (and times and music) of Dmitri Shostakovich.
 
The focus of The Noise of Time, inevitably and rightly, is on the compromises which Shostakovich was forced, and forces himself, to make in order to survive and this theme is made manifest on the very first page. He is standing by a lift in a state of terror, waiting to be taken by the secret police after Stalin had walked out of a performance of Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk: ‘All he knew was that this was the worst time’.
 
Or maybe not, because it is one of three crisis points – ‘conversations with Power' - which allow Barnes to create a series of monologues within the historical context, and despite the echo of Dickens in the opening line, it is to his great love Flaubert that Barnes nods in this desperately sad story of a man coming to terms with his betrayal of himself.
 
The inversion of Marx’s famous dictum may be glib, but it is true. ‘History repeats itself; the first time as a farce; the second time as a tragedy’.

​Which is an appropriate thought upon which to remember my summer reading, the complete works of Simon Raven, of whom it was famously said that he had ‘the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel’. It will not come as surprise to learn that I rate the Alms for Oblivion sequence to be funnier, more insightful, more telling, and superior to the Powell parallel, Dance to the Music of Time. And I admire, amongst so many other things, his description of his writing: "I arrange words in pleasing patterns in order to make money . . . I try to be neat, intelligent and lucid; let others be 'creative' or 'inspired'."
 
And so to the autumn, when it gets later earlier and my thriller and detective story writers invariably publish their latest novels. This year, Lee Child, Ian Rankin and Michael Connolly all had new books out on the same day and all, to a greater or lesser extent, disappointed. The Harry Bosch, The Other Side of Goodbye was probably the best; the new Jack Reacher, Night School, by some measure the worst, leaving the new Rebus, Rather Be The Devil, somewhere in the middle. Not bad, but, well, you know, haven’t we been here before?

​The other problem with these was that in the days before I turned to them I had been fortunate enough to read an uncorrected proof copy of a first novel by Rick Gekoski, who normally figures in my favourite non-fiction books.

​The eponymous protagonist of Darke is an extraordinary creation and the writing intelligent and intellectual, full of allusions and half-familiar references which haunt the reader as much as the narrative. It is one of the best novels I have read for many a year – but that’s all I have to say for the moment, because it will not be published until next year. But I promise you it will be worth the wait.

​And finally, another first novel: A Time for Peace by the poet Marg Roberts. Like Barnes, she combines the inner life of her characters with a well-researched insight into historical events, in this case the occupation of Serbia in the first world war. If I have a criticism, it is that too much pure research has made its way onto the page, but the writing is spare and sparse and the characters, which could so easily have become stereotypes, are beautifully drawn. I commend it to you.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Just created a lunchtime playlist for Wilde's. Dylan, Dead, Ella Fitzgerald, Chet Baker, Ry Cooder, Miles Davis, Yo la Tengo and loads more. It's great!

According to John Sutherland, reading well is almost as difficult as writing well. Which is probably why I have been struggling this year, giving up on such acclaimed publications as A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James and Jonathan Franzen’s Purity. I even failed with my annual re-reading of Ms Austen. It’s been that kind of year.
 
But there are a few books, fiction and non-fiction, with which I have persevered, and which will remain on my Kindle or on the culled bookshelves for whatever reason; as I anticipate a plethora of book tokens at Christmas, and therefore yet more stuff to read, it’s worth recording those which have made their mark on my consciousness in 2016.

​They have not necessarily made me a better person but as FE Smith remarked to a judge who claimed that after listening to the evidence he was ‘none the wiser’, ‘No, m’lud, but far better informed’.
 
It is, clearly, to non-fiction that I turn in order to learn. This year, four have stood out.
​

​The first reflects my unfashionable and unreconstructed fascination with and adherence to existentialism; whatever that is.

​Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café (with the wondrous sub-title of Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails) places existentialist thought in the context of existentialist living – praxis I think we used to call it – and is both a deceptively simple introduction to the works of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Merleau-Ponty et al but also a fascinating The Mandarins-like account of their feuds, debates, politics and love affairs. (It also makes the unreadable Heiddegger interesting which is an achievement in its own right.)

​There is an unlikely parallel with my second choice, The Pitch That Killed by Mike Sowell.

​In August 1920, Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians was struck on the head by a ball thrown by Carl Mays of the Yankees. Mays had joined the Red Sox on the same day as Babe Ruth before moving on, and the Sox players were among the most vehement in their condemnation of the pitch. Mays, after all, had form. It is a tragic event in the history of baseball, but Sowell places it in the context of class and culture, money and major league politics, the contrasting characters of the popular, charismatic Chapman and the surly, churlish Mays as well as the pennant race of that year. The story itself is tragic; the context is fascinating and brilliantly told.

e​The telling of the tale as much as the tale itself is also the key to The Candidate by Alex Nunns, the story of the improbable election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party – the first time.

​It is a political thriller which has, unsurprisingly, received little attention from the mainstream media, which emerges with about as much credit as the majority of Labour MPs and the party administration. To read this book is to become intimately acquainted not solely with the factionalism on right and left which has plagued the party, but also with the larger picture: what is the Labour Party? What's the point of it in a post-Brexit world?

​And finally, with pleasure, I return to Bob Dylan Dream: My Life with Bob.

I read – and reviewed - this exemplary memoir by poet, critic and uber-tweeter Roy Kelly earlier this year. Despite the sub-title, the most interesting sections are Bobless, because although we may measure out our lives in Dylan albums and shows, we are not defined exclusively by our relationship with him. What interests us is what draws us to Bob, those Wordsworthian spots of time which make us what we are.

​Roy’s book is his own Prelude and I commend it to you.
 
Next time, fiction.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Bob from 1989. It’s a while now and I had forgotten just how good those shows were.