Writings & Talks
On Nico - the life and lies of an icon:
‘A biography that encapsulates an entire age’ (The Times)
‘He blends compassion, scepticism and admiration…”She emanated something more than beauty, something more sublime, a different seduction,” wrote Jean Baudrillard of her. Witts helps us to see what that seduction was’ (Vogue)
On Artist Unknown - a history of the Arts Council:
‘That anyone should be capable of producing an eminently readable, even enjoyable, 500-page study of a quango is something of a marvel. That it should provoke the reader to laugh out loud is the sort of achievement that deserves, well, how about a grant from the Arts Council’s literary department?’
(Dan Glaister, The Guardian)
‘Riveting, witty and iconoclastic’
(The Independent):
On The Velvet Underground:
‘Witts’s little marvel of a book… It is a careful, funny, refreshing, and a corrective to all kinds of illnesses in the genre.’
(Mark Greif, The London Review of Books)
‘Academic books on popular subjects can be impenetrable balderdash but this one isn’t. I think the general reader should be pretty satisfied. Above all, it sends you back to the music.
(Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian)
On The Passage Post-Punk Poets:
Combining hazy visions of an 80s nightclub at 2am and an unflinching eye for satire and political commentary, these lyrics are as pertinent and forceful as they were during the post-punk heyday
(Unheard).