John Major: My Old Man. A Personal History of Music Hall

• Stefan A. Eick

The British politician John Major has written a book about the music hall, and much has been written about the apparent mismatch between subject and writer. Upon its publication, The Guardian’s Simon Callow presented his readers with “a funny thing – a history of the music hall by a former Conservative prime minister. Former PMs and party leaders have tended to write books about highly respectable subjects.” And in the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton imagined many people to expect a book “not done well but surprising in being done at all.” Given that music hall was a form of popular entertainment often associated with the lightweight, the morally outrageous, and the working class, these reactions are not surprising.