A Hero for High Times

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 * A defiant, funny lament for lost ideals. * The Sun * 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 * 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 * Best Holiday Reads, Evening Standard *