Like many 'early' readers of this book, I was aware of much of its content already; separately, not just from the many and varied sources quoted in it - but Mark Devlin has brought so many pieces of a puzzling jigsaw together in an immensely comprehensive and articulate way. Whichever you choose we hope you enjoy being part of your unique reading community – happy reading everyone! Or the overt use of occult imagery and rousing music during the London 2012 Olympics and Madonna's 2013 Super Bowl half time performance appearing in the regalia of the ancient Sumerian goddess Inanna-Ishtar, Madonna was quoted as saying afterwards in an interview to explain the ideas behind the performance as "The Super Bowl is kind of like the Holy of Holies in America. At home, there’s the potential for intergenerational involvement – comparing the music that defined the teenage years of their parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents.

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Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. There is a lot of potential to provoke talk, both in the classroom and at home, by using the format developed in this book.

It also covers positive changes and reasons for optimism with regards to racism, which helps to give the full picture of what it is like to be black and British.

Or the subject might be the miner’s strike, the troubles in Northern Ireland, 9/11, Brexit or 2020s lockdown. I think it's really poignant, I think it's really important and I think it's really accessible to be able to talk about these things via music.

And Other Big Questions; Musical Truth, Musical World, I Heard What You Said, and Kofi and the Rap Battle Summer. Reading David Olusoga’s Black and British last year cemented the personal recognition that my education and knowledge of this country’s history was severely lacking. This exhilarating playlist tracks some of the key shifts in modern British history, and explores the emotional impact of 28 songs and the artists who performed them. We live in a world of revisionist history with accepted facts, misinformation and downright lies fed to us and even when the truth finally does emerge it still has the burden of trying to be heard without being shouted down and silenced. The line that really sticks with me from Jeffery’s intro is: “Music can carry the stories of history like a message in a bottle.Diego Velazquez (1599-1660) was one of the towering figures of western painting and Baroque art, a technical master renowned for his focus on realism and startling veracity. Not only that but there’s an opportunity for pupils to explain their own music as part of a connected and wider social narrative.

Music both past and present has had and still does have an enormous effect on the public's state of mind and thought patterns, when you then combine imagery of sometimes an explicit nature, mixed messaging, symbology, hidden meanings, repetitive phraseology, subliminal tones and iconography you essentially create a breeding ground for subconscious ideas to ferment in someone's psyche completely unbeknownst to the listener/viewer. As the government’s national archive for England, Wales and the United Kingdom, The National Archives hold over 1,000 years of the nation’s records for everyone to discover and use. He remembers what it’s like to be young and captures so beautifully his eight-year-old boyish innocence of what makes a song ‘great’ – hey, everything is great when it sounds right and feels right, yes? Jeffrey's books include: Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials and the Meaning of Grime ; Black, Listed: Black British Culture Explored ; What is Masculinity?

The compelling story of over 5,000 years of Scottish art, told by Lachlan Goudie, renowned contemporary Scottish artist, broadcaster and presenter of BBC Four ‘s ‘The Story of Scottish Art’. Boakye’s captivating and deeply insightful book explores the key moments in Black history through twenty-eight powerful songs from ground-breaking musicians, from Lord Kitchener to Stormzy. This comprehensive introduction to Velazquez’s life and art includes a discussion of all his major works, and illustrates most of Velazquez’s surviving output of approximately 110 paintings.