Books Gift Guide Part II: Spuds, spies and sports
(Faber and Faber, €15.99), Brett Martin looks at the show creators responsible for television’s golden age. A series of idiosyncratic, autocratic personalities (except for collegiate Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad) emerge from his intelligent, gossipy thesis. The thought that Matthew Weiner, 44, who is notoriously controlling on the set of Mad Men, would ask a journalist not to print the fact he was smoking because he didn’t want his parents to know, is worth the book price alone.
Charles Emmerson takes a look at 23 cities — from old world metropolises, London and Rome, to colonial outposts like Algiers and Winnipeg, and to rising powers such as Tokyo — in (The Bodley Head, €27). There is so much that captivates, particularly the unending social detail and anecdote; it took three years, for instance, to assess JP Morgan’s gargantuan estate, which included 138 watches in one of his houses in London.
