- Published: 4 July 2019
- ISBN: 9780099575658
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 512
- RRP: $35.00
A Hero for High Times
A Younger Reader’s Guide to the Beats, Hippies, Freaks, Punks, Ravers, New-Age Travellers and Dog-on-a-Rope Brew Crew Crusties of the British Isles, 1956–1994
- Published: 4 July 2019
- ISBN: 9780099575658
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 512
- RRP: $35.00
Extraordinary... What a seditious, crackpot, transcendental riot this book is. My book of the year, and it’s only February.
Roger Lewis, The Times
Listen carefully, children, to a checklist of the British underground scene... This amiable and engaging blog-doc is an Odyssey for elective outsiders. Here are real monsters and sirens of Soho and Presteigne, legions of the talkative dead, and a great rattletrap camper van voyage carrying us back to the point of origin… A Hero for High Times is Ian Marchant’s monumental defence of the alternative way.
Iain Sinclair, Guardian
Infectious... [A] hugely engaging compendium of high ideals, low morals and apeshit behaviour.
John Walsh, Sunday Times
An up close and personal story of the counterculture... as well as a rumination on the nature of friendship.
Choice Magazine **Pick of the Paperbacks**
A lament for lost hope and a lost radicalism amid the conservatism of the contemporary world.
Teddy Jamieson, Glasgow Herald
A defiant, funny lament for lost ideals.
The Sun
Ian Marchant is one of Britain’s most remarkable, but under-recognized, writers. He is a true chronicler of the country... You never quite know what he’s going to do next, but what you do know is that it will be fascinating, and beautifully written... This, I think, is the book Marchant was born to write: it’s a testament, a collection of tall tales that all turn out to be true... It’s one of those books that seems to lift off its own pages: it’s an enactment of the very thing it describes. It places a whole way of life in context, and becomes, defying chronology, part of that context itself. I can put it no plainer than that
Nicholas Lezard, Dhaka Tribune
Made me laugh
**Books of the Year**, Spectator
A huge, generous, and fascinating study of the counterculture, from its earliest inception to Rave; and much of it seen through the prism of one unlikely survivor from the era
Nicholas Lezard, Best Holiday Reads, Evening Standard