REBELS, Beats and Poets is Jim Burns’s sixth collection of reviews and essays showcasing his interest in 20th-century bohemia. Originally published between 1968 and 2014 in various magazines — largely in the small press scene that he champions — the articles look beyond the big names to shine the spotlight on lesser-known writers, musicians and revolutionaries.

They’re a response to the fact that academics tend to focus on a handful of well-known writers, with the consequence that “little of the excitement that was evident in the late 1950s and early 1960s comes through.”

While he does include pieces on William Burroughs and Charlie Parker, he makes the period come to life with articles about the Hungarian-Jewish communist politician Jozsef Pogany, jazz composer and pianist Eddie Finckel and introductions to US publisher the Grove Press and the Paris-Amsterdam underground.

These are rarely intended to offer a potted history of the subject, as he cautions in an article about the Industrial Workers of the World — the Wobblies. Rather, they provide tantalising tasters that frequently reference other books to help the reader further explore their interest.

Burns provides an anecdotal personal touch throughout: “I wish I’d read a book like this before visiting Prague,” he laments about Derek Sayer’s Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History. “I brought books back buried at the bottom of my rucksack,” he confesses later, in a review of John Calder’s The Garden of Eros: The Story of the Paris Expatriates and the Post-War Literary Scene.

While at times the language is somewhat clumsy, as he says in a review of Ret Marut’s The Honourable Miss S… and Other Stories:“the honesty, humour, and warmth in the writing far outweighs a few technical lapses.”

Review by Susan Darlington