GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
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
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
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.
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