Reviewing Peter Ackroyd’s Alfred Hitchcockin the Daily Telegraph, Duncan White points out that both subject and author “were brought up in strict Catholic households in lower-middle-class London and both were boys in whom there was a contradictory mix of shyness and ambition. Both developed an insatiable appetite for work. Both publicly declared themselves celibate.” What’s more, “Ackroyd, who is gay, points out that homosexuality is ‘almost a leitmotif’ in Hitchcock’s films.” So while the book is “without any fresh revelatory material”, as the great films roll by “and Hitchcock refines his Hitchcock act, Ackroyd exploits small insights to extrapolate a tangible personality”. For Louise Jury in the Independent, “while no life of Hitchcock can be entirely dull, it is hard not to conclude that Ackroyd on Hitchcock was something of a quick-fire exercise in precis … For all the felicitous phrasing, a sneaking suspicion of a book written in haste remains.” Ian Thomson in the Financial Times was more positive: “Ackroyd’s biography is a deft synthesis of numerous other studies of ‘Alfred the Great’; it is well written … and unusually well attuned to the religious element.”
Reviews of Irvine Welsh’s A Decent Ride, described by his publishers as his “filthiest book yet”, have been cagily positive, though have treated it perhaps as something strange or exotic. “I think it’s safe to say,” wrote James Walton in the Spectator, that Welsh “is not a writer who’s mellowing with age. His latest book sees the return of ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson from the novel Glue… now an Edinburgh taxi driver in his mid-40s but still, in the face of some competition, possibly the most priapic character Welsh has ever created.” For a while the novel “looks as if it might resemble an extended prose version of Sid the Sexist from Viz comic” yet “Terry is extremely good company: … funny, often quite kind and with a genuine, if highly individual, sense of morality … Readers looking for literary decorum or flawlessness should definitely look elsewhere. If, however, you fancy an authentic and often thrilling blast of full-strength Irvine Welsh, then you’re in for a treat.” According to John Sutherland in the Times, “Bubbling underneath all the merry filth is the question ‘Who owns Scotland?’. Recent surveys record that half of the country’s land is owned by 500 people, overwhelmingly non-Scots. The owners used to be English aristocrats who valued grouse above crofters. Nowadays it’s more likely to be the internationally mega rich … The Scots, this amusing and thought-provoking novel implies, are mad as hell about it.”
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