Books published by Arbuthnot Books

Me Neither is a memoir of the years 1974-88. It celebrates a haphazard approach to building a career in the wake of the turbulent economic circumstances generated by the oil crisis of 1973. It also documents what were in effect the first stirrings of the gig economy.Despite the advantage of a privileged education the author's first job on graduating from Cambridge University is as a milkman. This is followed by stints as a bus conductor, stage hand and theatre box office assistant. After a sojourn in the Western Highlands writing a play, the author returns to London and talks his way into a number of jobs in marketing and magazine publishing. This phase is in turn superseded by a move into politics first as a local government officer at the GLC in the Ken Livingstone era and then as a magazine publisher for the Labour Party. Along the way there are glimpses of Cambridge, London and Scotland in the 1970s and Germany and the USA at the start of the 1980s. There is an account of the difficulties of magazine publishing in the pre-digital age and about parliamentary procedure in the House of Lords before it was reformed by Tony Blair's administration. There is inevitably some discussion of Labour politics. There are also plentiful references to the popular music of the era, both live and recorded.Memoir cannot help looking back and in the case of Me Neither with a certain amount of affection at a period whose stock is currently low. As the sorrows emanating from the Pandora's box of digital technology and a multi-polar world order become ever more apparent, the analog, bilateral world of the Cold War era is inevitably bathed in a nostalgic glow. If there is a nascent revisionism towards the 1970s, then this book is a part of that tendency.

Edinburgh 1977. The end of an era. The end of the postwar boom. The end of the sexual revolution. But for Saul and Catherine, postgraduate students meeting at the departmental party at the university, it seems like a beginning of sorts. Their attraction to one another is instantaneous, and the affair that follows at first seems all-absorbing - a heady mix of sexual desire and literary passions. But then the arrival of Saul's wife, Virginia, from New York, introduces darker notes of built and doubt, as the lovers find themselves increasingly enmeshed in their clandestine liaison.

The Swinging Sixties are coming to an end, but for Constance Reason, living out her twilight years in the Sussex countryside, they have largely passed her by. So she is in for a rude awakening, when her louche nephew, Sandy, turns up out of the blue, with his sinister boyfriend, Ray. Next on the scene is Iseult, Sandy's unworldly cousin (who has rather an ill-judged crush on him) and his melodramatic Aunt Leonora, once a leading light of the West End stage. Quite a crowd - and that's before Nick, a famous pop singer oozing bohemian decadence, appears, entourage in tow. Then all it takes is a whiff of midsummer madness - and marijuana - to unleash some very strange goings on indeed. Suddenly everybody's having the time of their lives. The question is - will they all live to tell the tale?

This is a story of love and astronomy; music and silence; secrets and truth-telling; of world-changing discoveries, and unrequited desire. Moving from York in the 1780s to Regency Bath, and then to Hanover in the 1840s, it concerns the lives of three people-all astronomers. There is Caroline, torn between her passion for music and her passion for the stars; John, deaf from childhood, whose extraordinary mathematical gifts afford him perspectives not available to others; and Edward, friend and mentor to Caroline and to John, who must conceal his innermost feelings from them both. All three find fulfilment in the heavens for the set- backs and disappointments they encounter on earth. All three, in time, come to know the truth about variable stars.