Absolute Beginners (Allison & Busby Classics)
Colin MacInnes
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 0749009985
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
London, 1958. Smoky jazz clubs, coffee bars and hip hang-outs. The young and the restless were creating a world as different as they dared from England's green and pleasant land. Follow our young photographer as he records a young teenager's life in the capital - sex, drugs and rock'n'roll; the era of the first race riots and the lead up to the swinging sixties. A twentieth-century cult classic, Absolute Beginners paints a vivid picture of a changing society with insight and sensitivity.
Countries and Their Cultures, Volume 1: Afghanistan - Czech Republic
Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War
Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us
Does positively sweet bugger-all about it. On the other hand, you could invite every whore and cut-throat in the city in for a pail of gin, or give a corpse accommodation for the night on the spare bed, or even set the bloody place on fire, and he wouldn’t turn a hair – or turn one if anybody complained to him about you. Not if you paid your rent, that is. In fact, the perfect landlord. The tenants come and go, as you might expect, but among the regular squatters I have a few particular buddies,.
Said, and stopped, and I swear the thought of her was more me then than I was. I sat down on a bench, and my voice said, ‘Boy, do be reasonable.’ One thing was right, I had to admit, in Suze’s smelly plans. Until you know about loot – I mean really know, know how to handle the big stuff, know what the difference is between, let’s say, five thousand pounds and ten (which are exactly the same to me), or what it’s like to look at anything and say, ‘I’ll buy it,’ or how the mugs will dance for you.
Opposites (he liked that group, and rifled it several times). From the shock of ideas, he told us, in this day and age, the light would shine! And the next thing we saw was the Hoplite with a cheery old geezer who’d obviously had four or five too many. The Hop was terrific: boy! if they don’t sign that cat up for a series, they’re no talent-spotters. He hogged the camera – in fact, the damn thing had to keep chasing him about the studio – and spoke up like he was King Henry V in a Shakespearean.
Have the sensation as you glide along, that you’re just hanging there over the water: no boat, just you and the surroundings. Well, this was the same (except, of course, that it was light, not dark – in fact, a glorious August day), the water sparkling so that I had on my Polaroids, the diesel chugging, and old Dad there, with his open-neck shirt and sandals, and his mackintosh in a roll (trust Dad!), and puffing away like an engine at his briar. Up there behind us, was the enormous castle, just.
The Ted on the deck was trying to get up, and the Dean pushed him down and held his neck with his Italian shoe. ‘We heard there’d been happenings,’ he said, ‘and thought we’d come up and take a dekko.’ ‘It’s all in the evening papers,’ said the Kid. Well, was I un-displeased! And was I glad it was two kids of my own age, and two jazz addicts, even if of different tendencies, and even if one was a layabout and the other a junkie, because this seemed to me to show their admiration for coloured.