These Foolish Things

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Audiobook Downloadable / ISBN-13: 9781405560276

Price: £24.99

ON SALE: 13th June 2024

Genre: Memoirs / Reportage & Collected Journalism

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Few people can say they have shaped the cultural landscape of the last four decades while crossing paths with some of the most extraordinary personalities on the planet. But then, of course, Dylan Jones isn’t just anyone.

These Foolish Things captivatingly charts Dylan’s life: from his peripatetic childhood and late adolescence in 1970s London – a city then alive with possibility – to his award-winning tenure at what would become one of the most dynamic magazines of its era, GQ. It details how he came to be in that hot seat: a journey through the Swinging London slipstreams of punk and new romanticism, and through i-D, The Face and Arena, which created the platform on which GQ was based, with Dylan as a common denominator.

Littered with a gold-star cast of characters – including a who’s who of celebrity from David Bowie and Bryan Ferry to Alastair Campbell and Prince Charles, via Samuel L. Jackson, Piers Morgan and Rihanna – this memoir reflects on how GQ became an established style and how Dylan sought to stir up music, politics and fashion.

Witty, perceptive and deliciously entertaining, but by turns bravely vulnerable, These Foolish Things is a memoir like no other: a dazzling retelling of the start of the twenty-first century from one of the world’s most fascinating media giants.

Reviews

From the heart of punk and the New Romantic Movement, he would eventually end up at the centre of Britain's shifting political discourse
National News
An insider's take on a wild world of egotistical celebrities, wayward columnists, tricky cover pop stars and, oh yes, the parties
Telegraph
These Foolish Things is the glittering chronicles of [Dylan's] adventures in media, music, politics and fashion
i
An extraordinary trip through modern British culture taking in some of the biggest names in pop, rock, media and art
Matthew d’Ancona
An absorbing and unstintingly entertaining memoir
Independent
Hilariously indiscreet
Nick Duerden
He is always in the room where it happens
Hadley Freeman, Sunday Times
Absolutely extraordinary
Esquire
A very personal memoir
New Statesman
A glittering career, on paper
Strong Words
Transported to a world of scarcely imaginable glamour, of sybaritic indulgence unrivalled since the days of Rome
Guardian
Dylan has run some of the most important newsrooms and magazines in the country. The story is anything but foolish
James Harding, Tortoise