I Know You got Soul - Jeremy Clarkson

I like Jeremy Clarkson. His dry wit and “grumpy old man” outlook, contrasting with Richard Hammond’s more boyish enthusiasm, make “Top Gear” an enjoyable hour’s viewing on BBC2 on a Sunday evening. It makes for a decent column in The Sun once a week as well, with this latter also proving that it’s not just cars he can write about the same way. He’s been doing the columnist bit for a while now, though, as evidenced by his previous book “The World According To Jeremy Clarkson”, which was essentially a collection of his writings in the Sunday Times. That wasn’t just about cars, but it was all about a grumpy old man poking fun at and holes in various ...  Read the complete review

When it comes to the newspapers on a Saturday I often find that I now buy the Sun for one simple reason, Clarkson’s column. The Top Gear presenter’s weekly column is certainly the best thing in the weekend papers and perhaps the only reason to buy the Sun. So when I was walking through my local Tesco and spotted his latest book for only £3.93 it seemed like a purchase I was destined to make. I’ve got a couple of his previous books somewhere in the house but never actually got round to reading them but with “I Know You’ve Got Soul” I decided to start reading it there and then. Within his latest book Clarkson has gone through the history books and selected a ...  Read the complete review

In this book my Clarkson he discusses some of the most amazing buildings, cars, machines and pieces of engineering and how they "have soul". He goes through all of the machines as you would expect talking about each one of them in each separate chapter. Unlike his other books it isn't a collection of articles from newspapers and other pieces of work, this is entirely different and written for the book - IMO this makes it much more readable and more fluent. Another difference to usual is Jemery's lack of comedy - usually he has fun by joking all the way through books, however this is written in a completely different style ...  Read the complete review

In this book Jeremy Clarkson describes why some machines are more than machines, they are legends, the Spitfire, Concorde, the Space Shuttle or an AK47. I remember in the mid 80's (I would've been 6 or 7) going to the air show at RAF Cosford, they only plane I can remember is Concorde, it did the briefest of fly pasts, other planes would have circled round and flown past several times but it is Concorde that I remember because it was the star. This book is about that, why do some machines capture our imagination but others don't. There are chapters on Concorde, Rolls Royce, Riva, Millenium Falcon, Flying Boats, SS Great Britain, Arthur, 747, AK47, Zeppelin, ...  Read the complete review