I’m sure Tulsa is going to lead to a flood of Dylan books about certain time periods and certain albums. And yet the marriages Eliot depicted most strikingly in her novels were nightmares of coercion and control – as if she were trying to warn women against leaping into folly. Janet Dempster is battered and thrown into the street barefoot by her drunken husband in Scenes of Clerical Life. In Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke, seeking intellectual communion with a like-minded spouse, winds up jealously circumscribed, thwarted and exploited by Casaubon, her pompous husk of a husband. Lena Dunham once tweeted of Eliot that “she was ugly AND horny!”. Let’s hope, but how Dunham would know is beyond me. Eliot took her correspondence with Lewes to her grave in Highgate cemetery. Carlisle’s biography focuses on intellectual rather than sexual fulfilment, depicting Mr and Mrs Lewes reading Dante, Darwin, Hegel and Goethe to one another in the afternoons after mornings spent in their respective studies frenziedly pen-scratching.

Thrillers review: A Double Life; Resin; Broken Ground

When did you realize that you didn’t just want to revise Behind the Shades, but to actually start over? Nearly thirty years ago, while Claire and her brother slept upstairs, a brutal crime was committed in her family's townhouse. The next morning, her father's car was found abandoned near the English Channel, with bloodstains on the front seat. Her mother insisted she'd seen him in the house that night, but his powerful, privileged friends maintained his innocence. The first lord accused of murder in more than a century, he has been missing ever since. Tulsa seems to have more papers for his middle years and his later years than his early years, so it’s going to be a lot for you to go over. What he can’t remember is that Dylan didn’t write “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” when he landed. He wrote it three days later. And in the interim, he recorded most of the album. He wrote “Sad Eyed Lady” because he’d run out of songs he intended to record, not because he’d arrive from Richmond and went, “Shit, I don’t have any songs.” Even at the time, he tweaked it. It would be a huge amount of work. I’d have to let the office agree to let me quote unpublished lyrics, which is a whole work in and of itself, of a big scale. To be honest, it just wouldn’t … I’ll leave it to someone else to do that.At that moment, she was not yet George, but someone else. Born Mary Anne Evans, she also used the name Marian and even Marianne, before assuming the pen name George Eliot, while letting herself be known as Mrs Lewes (not least to prospective landlords), and Polly to her beloved (whom in return she called Little Man). The woman we know as George had more than a double life: she made her way through Victorian patriarchy by any aliases necessary.

Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless, Hungry Feeling The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless, Hungry Feeling

The ending is rather abrupt, but that is to be excused, given that it's a first volume of a longer product. I will probably read the second one. If you had the chance to ask Dylan one question, what would it be? What would you want to hear him talk about in an honest way? Now, I'm waiting, as all readers must be, for the third book in the trilogy. And actually hoping that Philby won't stop at three. She's onto something here with her interconnected storylines. And I love it. No wonder she needs a corkboard that covers her entire wall (as she told the One More Chapter bookchat during her interview for her last book). Heylin tells the story of the pop world coming to grips with Dylan. Dylan had a difficult and tense relationship with the Beatles. He famously humiliated Donovan, who was called the English Dylan. Phil Ochs was a well known folksinger and songwriter. In their earlier days, he and Dylan were rivals. Ochs was a master of the protest song. Heylin tells the story of Ochs criticizing Dylan for his electric sound and Dylan delivering a crushing response; "Phil, you're not a songwriter, you're a journalist." This is the most well-researched (thanks to Tulsa and lots of new work by the author) biography of Bob Dylan there is, and I've read them all. It's a pity it ends after the '66 tour, and I hope Heylin is able to convince his publishers to do two more volumes instead of just one.

About the Author

Sure, Dylan's story (especially once he's dropped the Prince of Protest act in 1964) is engaging enough in its own right to carry the book through to the end; I think Dylan began, perfected, and surpassed every strand of 1960s Anglo-American popular culture by about 1967, and this biography's chapters on the confrontational and drug-addled 1966 electric tour in particular really capture how he'd made The Velvet Underground possible. Now as a 58 year old, I'm not even the slightest bit horrified of the antics of the young Dylan, and Mr. Heylin has found more of them for me to be nonplussed about. This book adds much richer details to Scaduto's outline. There are also new discussions of the drugs and women that Dylan used. Yeah. There’s a blues thing that Dylan goes into in the middle of the “Mixed-Up Confusion” session. And there’s an instrumental in the “The Times They Are a-Changin'” session, but Dylan gives it a title. It’s a proper instrumental, not a jam. Because they weren’t logged on the studio logs, they were missed. This isn’t a small matter, since Carlisle, philosophy professor at King’s College London, shows us how through her novels Eliot expanded what philosophy could be, not least by taking marriage seriously in a way that mere male philosophers would or could not. We phoned up Heylin in England to talk about his research process, what’s in store for the next volume, and his favorite (and least favorite) Dylan albums, along with his favorite era of the Never Ending Tour.