Books of the month: From Kazuo Ishiguro’s song lyrics to Family Politics by John O’Farrell

An attention-grabbingly titled debut novel from playwright Anoushka Warden, Peter Pomerantsev’s intriguing study of a genius propagandist who outwitted Hitler, and an important study of the distorted thinking patterns of Gen Z by Jonathan Haidt – Martin Chilton picks the best reads for this month

Our guide to March’s best books (Penguin Random House/Orion Books/Faber/iStock)

“You’re one of the Muppets, ain’t ya?” was blues legend John Lee Hooker’s response when John Belushi introduced himself on the set of The Blues Brothers. The story of that seminal 1980 movie, which starred Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as a pair of anarchic musicians, is neatly pieced together by Daniel de Visé in The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, The Rise of Improv and the Making of an American Classic (White Rabbit).

There are good music stories in the book, including about BB King being “crushed” after learning years later that director John Landis wanted him in the film, an offer that was never relayed to the guitarist by his manager. De Visé also reports how Landis was forced to plead “Please take that gun away from Mr Charles,” after blind singer Ray Charles fooled around with a weapon after a comic scene involving a shooting inside his Chicago music shop. The Blues Brothers was made in an atmosphere of excess and controversy. For example, Belushi – who died in 1982, aged just 33 – was consuming “mounds of cocaine”, and Carrie Fisher dropped acid just before a key scene. In addition, there was massive budget overspending, rows between cast members and problems with a “homophobic crew”. It’s a must-read for fans of a cinema classic.

It seems that 18th-century brothel owners had their own pre-Viagra cures for erectile dysfunction, aimed at men known as “flogging cullies”. “Flagellation was a fixation of the period… the theory was a good flogging would increase the blood rush to the necessary parts,” notes historian Julie Peakman in Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis. (Reaktion) This clear-eyed study of the sex lives of women from 1680 to 1830 also notes that diarist Samuel Pepys, a man whose name is usually spoken in reverent terms as a literary giant, was “a known groper”. That revelation didn’t seem to make it into his own diaries.