Heartbreak Is The National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music by Rob Sheffield … in which the long-time Rolling Stone staffer provides a droll, spirited fan’s eye view of Taylor’s dizzying rise to global supremacy.

And what a ride it is. In Heartbreak Is The National Anthem we follow her career from preternaturally assured adolescent, personally delivering home demos to the country music bigwigs along Nashville’s renowned Music Row, via feuds, mass fandom and eventually the gargantuan success – or “Taypocalypse” – of the world-conquering Eras Tour.

Memorably encapsulating her appeal to legions of young admirers (think, Sheffield tells us, “The Beatles times Motown times Bruce Springsteen times Britney times strawberry ice cream …”), he deploys an Anglophile 80s pop prism – there are namechecks for Morrissey, Paul Morley and the first Depeche Mode LP – to frame Swift’s work, reminding us of the mind-blowingly high standards that she’s maintained throughout an Imperial Phase that’s now, remarkably, approaching a full two decades.

Matt Tomiak

‘Where are we going, fellas?
‘To the top, Johnny!
‘Where’s that, fellas?
‘To the toppermost of the poppermost!’

John Lennon