John Higgs Audiobooks

John Higgs is an English writer, novelist, journalist and cultural historian – a difficult man to file under one heading, which is rather the point of him. He has published novels under the pseudonym JMR Higgs alongside biographies and works of cultural history.

His abiding subject is the counterculture of the 1960s and its long afterlife, traced through writers, artists and activists such as Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Moore and The KLF. It is a beat few writers cover at all, let alone this well: the junction where ideas, mischief and popular culture collide.

Higgs appears in our catalogue with William Blake vs the World and Watling Street, and both play to his strengths as a cultural historian: take something apparently familiar – a visionary poet, an ancient road – and walk around it until it looks strange and new again. That mode suits audio unusually well; his books have the quality of a brilliant companion talking as you go, forever pulling one more unlikely connection out of a pocket.

Listeners drawn to the sixties counterculture he has chronicled – Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Moore, The KLF – will recognise the same appetite for hidden patterns at work. For UK audiences, Watling Street in particular offers a rare pleasure: listening that changes how the country outside the window looks.