David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine

In this unique book, writer and academic Nicholas Royle uses the incongruous but compelling pairing of David Bowie and Enid Blyton to address pressing questions about education, the value of the arts and how to live in an age of pandemics and climate crisis. Drawing on more than forty years of university teaching, Royle combines passages on everyday life during COVID-19 with a series of lectures that discuss Bowie songs and explore the appeal of the Famous Five books. He uses Bowie's image of the 'sun machine' to propose an alternative to the existing education system, one rooted in personal moments of revelation triggered by works of literature. He also reveals Blyton's love affair with his illustrator grandmother and reflects on a series of photos of Bowie taken by the painter Stephen Finer, published for the first time here. While offering sombre reflections on the state of the world, David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the sun machine nonetheless contains a good deal of comedy and laughter. It travels joyfully from Bowie to Beethoven and Chopin, from Blyton to Shakespeare and Spike Milligan, finding new sun machines wherever it goes.