The celebrated literary critic judges Mozzer's book to be superb: he is so devastatingly articulate he could win the Booker -
Terry Eagleton - The Guardian,
'A new career beckons' … Morrissey at a book signing in Sweden. Photograph: Adam Ihsel/TT/EPA
Not content with being voted the greatest northern male ever, the second greatest living British icon (he lost out to David Attenborough) and granted the freedom of the city of Tel Aviv, Morrissey is now out to demonstrate that he can write the kind of burnished prose no other singer on the planet could aspire to. There are, to be sure, a few painfully florid patches in this superb autobiography ("Headmaster Mr Coleman rumbles with grumpiness in a rambling stew of hate"), but it would be hard to imagine Ronnie Wood or Eric Clapton portraying the "Duchess of nothing" Sarah Ferguson as "a little bundle of orange crawling out of a frothy dress, the drone of Sloane, blessed with two daughters of Queen Victoria pot-dog pudginess"
Morrissey despises most of the people he meets, often with excellent reason. He is scurrilous, withdrawn and disdainful, an odd mixture of shyness and vitriol. The dreamy, heart-throbbish photo on the cover of the book, the nose rakishly tilted above the Cupid's-bow lips, belies what a mean old bastard he is. He finds an image of himself in (of all people) the minor Georgian poet AE Housman, who preferred art to humanity and whose ascetic, spiritually tortured life seems to echo Morrissey's own. He admires wayward, bloody-minded types much like himself, and takes a sadistic delight in discomforting interviewers. "Why did you mention Battersea in that song?" a journalist asks him. "Because it rhymes with fatty," he replies. Taken by his father at the age of eight to watch George Best play at Old Trafford, he swoons at the sight of such artistry combined with such rebelliousness. Years later, others will swoon at his own mixing of the two.
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