From Manchester with Love

Paul Morley writes about things you thought you knew about — and then shows you so many new facets. Reading From Manchester With Love I feel I understand the times we’ve lived through differently, better, and from new angles. The writing is compelling and musical, befitting its extraordinary subject. I never met Tony Wilson, but now I feel as though I knew him well — and I’m sorry that I didn’t.

Eye-opening . . . In this bracing and often surprisingly tender biography, Paul Morley hits all the points between the graffiti and the gravestone, finding more than two sides to Wilson’s mercurial story . . . From Manchester with Love is the perfect monument.

From Manchester With Love is like Wilson in that it assumes the same of its reader: intelligence, bloody-mindedness, a romantic, revolutionary soul. It requires concentration, mixing, as it does, careful interviewing with flights of fancy, revealing detail with time-travelling description. More than a mind map, the book’s peculiarity and expanse and, yes, love, means it becomes an immersive experience. I found it very moving indeed.

Paul Morley’s writing has been delighting and exasperating me since his NME work in the late 1970s. His biography of Anthony H Wilson – TV presenter, music entrepreneur and evangelist, provocateur – From Manchester with Love is by far his best book; the narrative of the man’s life keeps Morley’s wildly digressive style taut(ish). It is not just a “biog” but the story of a city’s history and culture and a unique and disappearing figure: the engaged working-class intellectual challenging the dominance of entitlement and privilege with wit and aesthetics.

Morley’s biography is as illuminating on Wilson’s strange ability to hold others in his orbit, even after his death, as it is on the story of his life . . . fascinating . . . [Morley] is particularly deft on the forces that shaped Wilson . . . [and] particularly good on Wilson's regionalism.

As much a (brilliant) biography of Manchester as it is of Tony Wilson . . . It's a fantastically written, sprawling, superbly research book that's both heartfelt tribute and essential reference work.