MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence
Politically illiterate biography of a great working-class writer
RURAL IDYLL: DH Lawrence (right) in West Berkshire, 1919
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
YOU wouldn’t know from Frances Wilson’s biography of DH Lawrence that he came into his vocation as a writer at the same time as the Great Unrest, the massive strike wave that shook Britain from 1910 to 1914.
Nor that his tortured experience of wartime England included awareness of the Russian Revolution nor, as the son of a miner, that he even noticed the Triple Alliance strikes of miners, transport workers and railwaymen in 1919 and 1921.
Wilson's Lawrence has no political awareness and this absence is a painful omission. It is typical of the class-blind misreadings that have distorted the reputation of England’s ever-controversial and first professional working-class writer.
More from this author
ANGUS REID applauds the ambitious occupation of a vast abandoned paper factory by artists mindful of the departed workforce
ANGUS REID calls for artists and curators to play their part with political and historical responsibility
ANGUS REID recommends a landmark work of aural history that follows the intertwined lives of four International Brigaders
ANGUS REID reviews a book that is an important and comprehensive work of documentation
