I am extremely late to this party, as ‘Broken Greek’ has now been in paperback for a couple of months. Back in 2020, its initial appearance was greeted by a chorus of rave reviews and widespread, well-deserved appreciation. It not only won the Royal Society of Literature’s 2021 Christopher Bland Prize, it was also my…
Category: social history
A Remarkable Meditation on Masculinity at the Barbican
Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at the Barbican is an exploration of male identity from the 1960s to the present day! The subject is vast and being the Barbican, it’s a big show, taking up two levels of floor space and showcasing three hundred artworks from celebrity photographers such as Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe, through…
SCANDI-NOIR IN SE21: Harald Sohlberg the Dulwich Art Gallery
There is a sense in these works of the landscape giving form to thought, a quality that puts you in mind immediately of the similarly curious, almost uninhabited cityscapes of Atkinson Grimshaw.
Don McCullin
Don McCullin, who has a fair claim to the title of the UK’s greatest living photographer, was born in 1935 in Finsbury Park – a bloody tough area of London before the war, and even more so after, when much of it had been bombed flat. The first photograph McCullin was paid for, in 1958,…