Hungry like the wolf

RECKLESS hedonistic highs are nothing new – the success of Martin Scorsese’ s The Wolf Of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as disgraced Wall Street trader Jordan Belfort, has been very revealing.

But former car salesman Lincoln Townley takes it to dizzying heights in his memoir, The Hunger. The biographical book is an honest and unflinching account of the 41-year-old as he hits the depths of his addictions from August 2009 until February 2011.

Addiction is ugly. And relentless, he recalls in the opening page.

Back then, Townley, who was sales and marketing director for a famous men’s club in Soho, lived only for three things – alcohol, cocaine and carnal pleasures (read: women).

Raw, raunchy and crude at times, The Hunger, which is dedicated to his County Durham-born actress wife Denise Welch, is a fascinating and gripping read, and anyone who has suffered with addiction can relate to Townley’s experiences.

Shereen Low

Clothes Clothes Clothes, Music Music Music, Boys Boys Boys by Viv Albertine (Faber & Faber, £14.99) 5/5 stars 

BEFORE Beyonce, before The Pretenders, before even Madonna, there was The Slits, an all-female punk band whose album Cut is still mentioned reverentially in cult music circles.

Viv Albertine was the band’s imperious guitarist who went on to make a career as one of the UK’s first aerobics teachers, a filmmaker and actress and memoirist.

This is not your usual rock memoir though. Her compelling narrative takes in her struggle to find love, the anguish of repeated cycles of IVF and trying to remain true to her artist-self while maintaining a normal family life. Albertine tells life like it is, in all its funny, maddening, bittersweet glory.

Anita Chaudhuri

Neptune by Craig L Symonds (OUP, £20) 4/5 stars 

THE bodies fell in their thousands on the French beaches on D-Day in the invasion 70 years ago that eventually liberated Western Europe in World War Two.

But success for the Allies lay as much in the incredible naval operation.

Symonds does a brilliant job of describing how the germ of an idea in the winter of 1941 turned into a dynamo that delivered the goods in 1944. It is a story of a miracle of industrial organisation, mountains of hard work by hundreds of thousands in factories, offices and shipyards, as well as at sea, and unprecedented levels of co-operation between sovereign states.

With 5,000 ships putting 160,000 troops ashore on more than 50 miles of coastline it is nice that the likes of the British Admiral, Sir Bertram Ramsay, who controlled the naval forces during the invasion, also receive due recognition.

Fascism: A Very Short Introduction by Kevin Passmore (OUP £7.99) 3/5 stars 

FASCISM in all its form is put under the microscope and is found to be just as odious as ever. The why, when and how of any resurgence is also examined, and with the growing popularity of politicians such as Marine Le Pen in France, the omens are not too hopeful.

Euro Crisis and its Aftermath by Jean Pisani-Ferry (OUP £20) 3/5 stars 

WHAT a time to bring out a book singing the praises of the Euro and pressing for even more political and economic integration to ensure that it doesn’t die a well-deserved death.

Pisani, chief of Policy Planning Staff for the French PM, was unlucky to become a victim of the seismic European elections, but even without the Euro earthquake he was treading on shaky ground.

Just like a medieval doctor who would keep on prescribing leeches to draw more blood from a sick patient, so Pisani advocates even more stringent measures to revive the Euro corpse.

Worlds of King Arthur by Guy Halsall (OUP £10.99) 3/5 stars 

A RIGHT slap in the face for all those Camelot and Sword-in-the- Stone fantasists, who believe in a legendary and heroic King Arthur saving Britain from the savage Saxons.

Marshalling a whole army of facts and demolishing a whole mountain of fiction, Halsall delivers a picture of a Dark Age Britain devoid of magic and myth.

But the result is no less exciting and dramatic for all that.

Steve Craggs