Image: Clem Onojeghuo. Courtesy of Pexels About Britain: A Journey of Seventy Years and 1,345 Miles Tim Cole, Bloomsbury Continuum, June 2021, 384 pages, £18.99 KEN BELL drives down a northwestern Memory Lane The Festival of Britain in 1951 was intended to show that the war was over and Great Britain was back on her…
Tumuli at Revesby in Lincolnshire Sunken Island: An Anthology of British Poetry Various authors, edited by Alexander Adams, foreword by William Clouston, London: Bournbrook Press, 2022, pb, 55pps, £12.50 Bournbrook Press is an offshoot of Bournbrook Magazine, founded in 2019 to offer a “primarily British audience with traditionalist, socially conservative argument and entertainment”. This venture’s…
Corpse of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico The Last Emperor of Mexico: A Disaster in the New World Edward Shawcross, Faber & Faber, January 2022, 336 pages, £20 KEN BELL reflects on a Mexico that might have been Mexico has only ever had one ruler who cared about the Indians and he was shot by order…
Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 Max Hastings, William Collins, September 2022, 576 pages, £30 KEN BELL recalls the Cold War’s most dangerous moment 2022 has been the sixtieth anniversary year of the Cuban Missile Crisis so a lot has been written about the event, with Max Hastings’ Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 being…
STUART MILLSON enjoys some neglected gems of British music Why does the spiritual toll of the Great War seem to have been harsher for Britain than for any of the other European combatants, asks organist, scholar, music-writer Robert James Stove, in commentary for a booklet which accompanies a new CD on the Australian Ars Organi…
Basil Bunting. Photo: National Portrait Gallery, Creative Commons licence Letters of Basil Bunting Selected and edited by Alex Niven, Oxford University Press, 2022, £35 LIAM GUILAR welcomes new insights into a little-studied modernist's mind Basil Bunting died in 1985. Despite having been praised as one of the twentieth century’s ‘greatest poets’ critical attention to his…
Wildcat Dreams in the Death Light Reagan M. Sova, First to Knock, 2022, 265 pages, US$17 LIAM GUILAR takes a ringside seat for a dazzling extravaganza ‘Wildcat Dreams in the Death Light is an incantatory work of narrative poetry. Infused with hobo melancholy, Jewish lore, bloodshed and hilarity…’. It’s rare for a blurb to be…
Chips Channon. Photo: National Portrait Gallery, Creative Commons licence The Diaries 1943-1957 Henry ‘Chips’ Channon and Simon Heffer, Hutchinson, 896pp, £35 KEN BELL closes the book on the celebrated diarist This third volume of the Channon diaries concludes the publication of all the surviving diaries that have come down to us, and as with the…
Photo: Ivan Radic. Wikimedia Commons Artivism – The Battle for Museums in the Era of Postmodernism Alexander Adams, Societas – Imprint Academic, pp 215, £14.95 GUY WALKER welcomes a spirited sortie onto the cultural battlefield One function of placing fine paintings in ornate gold frames or sculptures on marble plinths is to demonstrate the special…
Crowland Abbey. Photo: Derek Turner Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire Derek Turner, Hurst & Co., 2022, hb., 446pps, 32 col. Illus. & map, £20 PAUL GARNER enjoys a survey of an oddly little-known county Edge of England is a rich tapestry woven of many threads—history, nature, industry, geography, religion and folklore—all intertwining to create…