Indeed, the Satanist Aleister Crowley is one of the most prominent names throughout the book. ![]() It could be construed as a Great Man (or should that be a Strange Person?) approach to history, but in fact Higgs is able to situate such apparently anomalous individuals within a wider context of shifting perspectives and cultural patterns across a range of different disciplines, from modern art to quantum mechanics. One of the book’s most successful features is its focus on the eccentricities of some of the century’s most unusual characters to structure its narrative – Norton I (self-proclaimed Emperor of the United States) and the tin can-wearing Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to name just two. It might seem rather ambitious to jump from covering a duo famous for burning their work in a field after failing to get permission for an ABBA sample, to charting a whole century, but it actually seems a logical progression as Higgs portrays the time period as having a similar chaotic character to the career of the electronic outsiders. Higgs’ previous offering tracked the career of one of the most idiosyncratic music acts from the tumultuous acid house scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the KLF. Delving into these ‘patches of thick, deep woods’ in just 315 pages is no mean feat, yet Higgs does a good job of translating the theory into an easy and entertaining read. ![]() ![]() In his latest volume, John Higgs offers a new perspective on the previous century, paying special attention to its more curious products: as varied as Einstein and relativity, surrealism and postmodernism.
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