'The most illuminating odyssey through lost, hidden or forgotten English pop culture since Michael Bracewell's England Is Mine.' Rhian E. Jones, author of Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender. Albion's Secret History compiles snapshots of English pop culture's rebels and outsiders, from Evelyn Waugh to PJ Harvey via The Long Blondes and The Libertines. By focusing on cultural figures who served to define England, Guy Mankowski looks at those who have really shaped Albion's secret history, not just its oft-quoted official cultural history. He departs from the narrative that dutifully follows the Beatles, The Sex Pistols and Oasis, and, by instead penetrating the surface of England's pop history (including the venues it was shaped in), throws new light on ideas of Englishness. As well as music, Mankowski draws from art, film, architecture and politics, showing the moments at which artists like Tricky and Goldfrapp altered our sense of a sometimes green but sometimes unpleasant land. 'Guy Mankowski has written the book I've been wanting to read for years. 'Albion's Secret History is a highly intelligent and loving meditation on creativity and artistic freedoms, pursued over decades by a host of innovators, to those who had previously been denied on the basis of their position within English culture. Mankowski joins so many beautiful dots and creates a mesmerising story of social struggle and the shock and influence of the new. Magnificent and truly brilliant.' Daniel Gothard, author of Reunited and Simon Says. 'No future in England's Dreaming? The gleaming fragments of the nation's cultural and countercultural histories unearthed by Guy Mankowski's Albion's Secret History suggest otherwise.' Karl Whitney, author of Hit Factories: A Journey Through the Industrial Cities. 'This is a superbly written book, where Mankowski tells how uncomfortable, awkward and magnificent it is to be English. It tells of a scary and beautiful world of musical geniuses, mavericks, chameleons, perverts and wizards, who thought that England was theirs and that it owed them a living, turning Albion into a treasure that everybody with a decent taste in music and some sense of humour can cherish.' Giacomo Bottà, Adjunct Professor in Urban Studies and Music Research, University of Helsinki. 'Already recognised as a major rising talent, Mankowski here establishes himself as a significant voice.' Andrew Crumey, Man Booker Longlisted author of Sputnik Caledonia.'Albion's Secret History offers a refreshing upheaval of the concept of fixed British character to present a united sub-culture that instead runs on a creative spirit of constant evolution and reinvention. A host of freaks, rebels, and geniuses stand under one banner to feast on panthers, wear bleeding hearts of many stripes on their sleeves, each pursuing artistic liberty that would continue to rock the political establishment and old social orders to their core, calling death on the ashes of tradition as these heroes and heroines dance in its flames. Mankowski offers an emergent nostalgia for the future that rips through the strictures of class identity that we are still wrestling with today. Incisive, insightful and vital.' Adam Steiner, author of Into The Never: Nine Inch Nails And The Creation Of The Downward Spiral