For all Heylin’s flaws – the clunkiness, the pettiness, the self-indulgence, the needless score-settling – Far Away From Myself is not just another Bob Dylan book. Indeed, it’s so all-encompassing that it is probably the last word on the singer. And how Heylin would love that. However, I was puzzled by the ending; apparently Anna Witherall has committed suicide. I was at a loss. Then I remembered I was puzzled by the ending of The Most Difficult Thing. Nearly thirty years ago, while Claire and her brother slept upstairs, a brutal crime was committed in her family's townhouse. The next morning, her father's car was found abandoned near the English Channel, with bloodstains on the front seat. Her mother insisted she'd seen him in the house that night, but his powerful, privileged friends maintained his innocence. The first lord accused of murder in more than a century, he has been missing ever since. I went to a lot of trouble trying to find the first reference to “Hammond’s Folly.” I can’t find any contemporary reference. The first one is Robert Shelton in 1966, which is late. And it’s clear he was told that story by Hammond. And by 1966, Hammond has his own reasons for wanting to present that story. After discovering Dylan, his name fell off the cliff again since he hadn’t actually found anyone else, and so he starts to develop the story. Finally, Eliot has got the biographer she deserves, namely an ardent and eloquent feminist philosopher who shows us how and why Eliot’s books, rightly read, are as philosophically profound as any treatise written by a man. Carlisle has edited Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s Ethics and recently wrote a book on the philosopher’s expansive understanding of religion.

Her argument chimes with what another female philosopher, Iris Murdoch, wrote in her essay Against Dryness, where she indicted anglophone analytic philosophy for its detachment from the blood and guts of life. Murdoch’s novels, like Eliot’s, went where male-dominated academic philosophy feared to tread.A Double Life is first and foremost a psychologically driven character study, which examines class and privilege and the role that plays in the crime that was committed. This kind of reminded me of something like The Secret History or Social Creature or The Riot Club, but instead of telling the story from an insular perspective that indulges in the fantasy of living that kind of possibly elite life, it's like if The Secret History had been narrated by Richard's mother, or someone else who was close enough to touch that lifestyle without actually living it. Consequently it's not quite as glitzy and glamorous as any of those other stories mentioned, but it gives us a protagonist who's easy to relate to and root for. The plot is gripping as well, though it's not particularly twisty - but that's fine as Berry's writing keeps you engaged throughout. Claire as a character is underdeveloped and not fleshed out. She sounds a little unhinged at times, but that may be due to her brother's opioid addiction and her obsessive quest to find her father.

It’s a strange business, trying to write the definitive account of the ultimate unreliable narrator, and Heylin captures Dylan the curmudgeon very well. You begin to understand his obfuscation as the behaviour of someone tormented by other people’s attempts to dissect him. There is a fascinating account of his 1981 trip to London zoo disguised in a hoodie: he was eventually moved on by a keeper at closing time. In subsequent years he started to cut people off, then randomly hooked up with old flames, telling one he thought he had seven or eight children out there. In the 1990s he isolated himself from fellow musicians: those who toured as his support act might not be allowed to approach him in a hotel corridor. He feared an unflattering memoir his mother might read. The premise sounded intriguing but an uneven writing style, poorly developed characters and a confusing tone made this a dud. The book ends in 1966, Dylan a mere twenty-five and already burned out by the cage of fame, living on the edge, fueled by alcohol, drugs, physically and psychologically worn to a skeleton from an overindulgence of the senses, at a breaking point. And another chance to reinvent his life. One minute she's discussing her patients and the next paragraph she's reminiscing about the ice cream her father brought her the day before he went ballistic. WTF? A Double Life has a number of characters, none that particularly appealed but I did not have to like them to become wrapped up in their lives. Tom was the only person I felt deserved my empathy, Gabriela is self-centred, self-serving and basically just selfish. Getting herself caught up in a dreadful situation that spirals completely out of control, Gabriela doesn’t consider the result of her actions taken until it clearly becomes too late.Philby’s classy second novel is hard to pin down to any one specific genre combining as it does a number of elements but there is no doubt from the ever-present sense of creeping dread throughout that it’s deep into thriller territory. A Double Life examines the actions and consequences of two believably flawed female protagonists whose lives are on very different paths but against all expectations about to collide in the most unimaginable way.

Though Claire has managed to create a successful life with a high-end profession, she's never given up wanting him to face justice and either prove his innocence...or guilt, if that's the case. Is she even prepared to see him after all these years? A Double Life tells the parallel stories of two women, Isobel, a journalist, and Gabriela, who works for the Foreign Office. It started off promisingly but then unravelled rapidly. However A Double Life was more of a domestic noir novel told from the view point of two characters: Gabriela who works for the foreign office and is living with her partner and two young children is the main focus. Isobel, the other protagonist is a reporter who witnesses a murder whilst high on drugs.I’ve read so many times that Dylan was known as “Hammond’s Folly” around the label in 1962 and 1963. It’s a good story, but it’s just not true. Now as a 58 year old, I'm not even the slightest bit horrified of the antics of the young Dylan, and Mr. Heylin has found more of them for me to be nonplussed about. This book adds much richer details to Scaduto's outline. There are also new discussions of the drugs and women that Dylan used.

Of course, it’s a strange situation. You don’t normally do a complete new book on a subject you’ve already seemingly covered. I tried to make it a very different book. As I say in the introduction, I tried to use material that has historical veracity. By that, I mean a document, tapes, contemporary recollections rather than latter-day recollections. There’s still great anecdotal stories in Behind the Shades that absolutely reward reading. It seemed that stalking her father's friends and concocting stories to insinuate herself into their inner circle was her full time job.The two women don't seem to have any connection, except that during Isobel's investigation, she meets briefly with Madeline, a former colleague of Gabriela's. I love how Flynn Berry creates and breathes life and soul into a character- in this case Claire, whose father killed her Nanny, attempted to kill her Mother then disappeared seemingly into thin air…