MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’
The great English poet JOHN KEATS died 200 years ago and his radical understanding of aesthetics reaches far into the future, writes Jenny Farrell
(L to R) John_Keats sculpture by Vincent Gray in Chichester and the poet's former home in Hampstead, now the Keats House museum
[(L to R) Sidpickle and Alphauser/Creative Commons] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
ACCORDING to George Bernard Shaw, John Keats “achieved the very curious feat of writing a poem of which it may be said that if Karl Marx can be imagined writing a poem instead of a treatise on Capital, he would have written Isabella.”
Shaw’s view clashes with that of most mainstream critics, who deny Keats any political thought and declare him a worshipper of some unspecified “beauty.” But the 200th anniversary of Keats’s death on February 23 at the age of only 25 is an opportunity to reclaim the reputation of this revolutionary romantic.
In his time, the implications of the English and then the American and French revolutions, heralding the arrival of capitalist society in Europe and elsewhere, were understood and feared by conservative governments across Europe.
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As Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th anniversary is celebrated in Berlin and New York, JENNY FARRELL urges viewers of the German Romantic painter to understand its true historical context, and beware its co-option by the far-right
As Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th anniversary is celebrated in Berlin and New York, JENNY FARRELL urges viewers of the German Romantic painter to understand its true historical context, and beware his co-option by the far right
