Londongrip’s readers are invited to take a cruise on the Thames Estuary on Sunday, 27th August. The cruise offers an unusual opportunity to get a closer look at some of the Estuary’s less accessible attractions: the Red Sands Forts, built to protect London during the Second World War; the sunken cargo ship, SS Richard Montgomery and the Thames Sailing barges racing in their annual match.
year 2017
Sarah Lawson finds seriousness and humour, the personal and the fanciful in this recent and retrospective selection of Shanta Acharya’s poetry
Alex Josephy finds authentic voices in Deborah Tyler-Bennett’s poems of theatrical nostalgia
Thomas Ovans admires the fluency and versatility on show in Brian Docherty’s most recent collection
D A Prince is surprised and delighted by very substantial first collection from David Cameron
Jeremy Wikeley reviews Rishi Dastidar’s first collection and looks forward to his further poetic development
Peter Daniels finds Andrew Waterman’s chapbook sequence a little too restrained for its own good
Thomas Ovans browses an ambitious anthology of poems inspired by the artist Stanley Spencer and finds that every picture may tell several stories
Pam Thompson is intrigued by the dream-poems in a new collection by Charles Lauder
Following in Fitzgerald’s Footsteps: Brian Docherty reviews Ruth Valentine’s small but politically significant and beautifully illustrated new collection from Hercules Editions
Vulgarity so self-confident, so unrepentant wins a kind of horrified respect. Ken Russell stands on his own, a mixture, at once frightening and preposterous, of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Hieronymus Bosch and the propaganda-poster artists of the Third Reich. Dilys Powell reviewing Mahler, Sunday Times, 1974.
In a capitalist society, we’re nearly all hired hands, but the extent of the exploitation is more or less pernicious. Melvyn Bragg’s gritty, Northern, sweeping tale ultimately finds the best option for the ordinary man is to accept a pittance to work above ground rather than to toil in a futile World War I trench or in a narrow coal seam beneath the sea.
By Barbara Lewis • musicals, plays, theatre, year 2017 • Tags: Barbara Lewis, musicals, plays, theatre