If Brexit is the result of a backward-looking nostalgia, the Swinging London of the Chelsea Set was the opposite: it marked a determination to move on from the devastation and austerity left by World War II.
David Cooke commends the ability of Iraqi poet Fawzi Karim both to reflect and to transcend his own circumstances
Kate Noakes relishes a short sequence by Maitreyabandhu which combines nature writing and memoir
Merryn Williams discovers that Anne Stewart’s poems about bereavement succeed on several levels
Jeremy Wikeley eventually comes to terms with the unconventional poetry of James Davies
Mat Riches assesses the success of Greg Gilbert’s attempts to make poetry out of his experience of serious illness
Stephen Claughton is transported by Wendy Holborow’s atmospheric poems from India and Africa
In 1962 The Westinghouse Corporation made a documentary film exploring the state of the nation as Britain continued to register the aftershocks of war, adjusted to the loss of empire and witnessed the erosion of its status as a world-class industrial nation.
Adele Ward praises Robert Peake’s highly personal collection for both skill and emotional authenticity
Almost exactly 100 years ago on April 13, in Amritsar, the British Indian Army fired into a crowd of unarmed Punjabis, killing and harming hundreds. Director Phil Wilmott marks this appalling example of man’s inhumanity to man by transporting Othello from Venice and Cyprus to the India of the British Raj.
The vitality of breath and its life power expressed in Jeff Koons’ sculptures and paintings mesmerise the viewer at the Ashmolean exhibition.
Edvard Munch ‘Love and Angst’. Review by Barbara Lewis.
We’ve all seen it a hundred times, identified with it and even messaged using an emoticon version of Edvard Munch’s skull-like face, clutched by hands raised in horror in a distorted, nightmarish world.