As for his politics, ‘I can’t stand the Right, I can’t stand the Left and I really can’t stand the appeasing, quietist, weedy, status quo “liberal” centre’. My only complaint is that some of the many, many passages about music and musicians threaten to turn parts of the book into NME-style critic's screeds and take the focus temporarily off the author and his own story, where in a memoir, it should in theory remain. As is usually the case with the kind of political debates that live largely on Twitter or any other corner of the internet, in print they are almost always going to age poorly.

Toy Fights” – Chicago Review of Books Avoiding Boredom in “Toy Fights” – Chicago Review of Books

In lengthy digressions he fulminates against middle-class “fake leftists” or everything to do with social media. For Paterson, a successful poem strips back our experience to its constituent parts, revealing the ghosthood that lies beneath.

He goes to Baldragon Academy, a bracing sort of institution: ‘On a regular day chairs were hurled through windows, legs were ripped off pigeons and sh***s taken in teachers’ desk drawers. The book keeps taking breaks from being, like, genuinely brilliant to just relitigate some shit from the internet, stuff you get the sense he was really annoyed at that day, whether it relates to what he was writing or not.

Toy Fights: A Boyhood — Don Paterson’s memoir

While the book offers few big reveals beyond her testimony (many details leaked before publication), her behind-the-scenes account of the chaotic Trump administration is intermittently insightful. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Her initial portrait of Trump is less critical than those written by other former staffers, as the author gauges how his actions were seemingly stirred more by vanity and fear of appearing weak, rather than pure malevolency. We should hope that this wisdom, applied to Paterson – a poet, aphorist, musician, critic and teacher, who has never entirely specialised – doesn’t prove true, because another memoir as funny and affecting as this, covering the next twenty years of his life would be very gratefully received. You might emerge from Baldragon with a heroin habit, tears tattooed on your face, pregnant, dead or all of the above, but you might have added to that a Higher Latin, an opinion on the South Sea Bubble and some basic facility on the clarinet.It takes a chapter or two to get used to the way DP expresses himself but once I was fully tuned in I found it to be one of the funniest books I’ve read. Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters.