Caroline Maclean is finishing a PhD at Birkbeck on the Russian influence on British modernism.
‘You will see that this little clicking contraption with the revolving handle will make a revolution in our life – in the life of writers,’ Tolstoy allegedly said on his 80th birthday, in 1908. It is difficult, now, to recapture the excitement that greeted the first moving images. The new magical machine, it was variously believed, could bring the dead back to life, enable...
It is best to read Iain Sinclair’s work out of the corner of your eye. The action takes place on the peripheries; it disintegrates if you concentrate too hard on the middle. Dining on Stones, a postmodern thriller for geeky pedestrians, doesn’t really have a story; Sinclair’s idea of a plot is a walk. Andrew Norton, a disillusioned flâneur, novelist and bookseller lives...
From 1931 until the outbreak of war, Hampstead was the home of an emerging progressivism in art – not quite radical, a little domestic in fact, and also in thrall to the bolder experiments taking place...
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