A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties
By Suze Rotolo
Aurum Press £16.99, 371 pages
Author Suze Rotolo is pictured on the cover of the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, clutching Dylan’s arm as they walk down a snowy street in Greenwich Village. Her memoir is a nostalgic evocation of Village bohemia in the early 1960s, shacked up in an apartment on West Fourth Street with the up and coming Dylan, “a beacon, a lighthouse … [but] also a black hole”.

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century
By Alex Ross
Fourth Estate £20, 624 pages
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross sets himself the ambitious task of telling not just the history of 20th-century music, but also a history of the 20th century as experienced through its music. The Rest Is Noise achieves the aim with bravura, hacking out a path leading from cacophonous European modernism to the white noise of The Velvet Underground.