RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
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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
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
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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