Editorial Hello and welcome to our summer edition!It finds yours truly in a slightly breathless mode.A couple of months ago the service which had hosted Albion for over ten years experienced a catastrophic failure, and the website was irretrievably lost.This made it necessary to build a new website from scratch, meaning that my attention has recently been divided between designing a new online presence and getting the summer edition together.None of this would have been possible without the phlegmatic optimism and encouragement of the wonderful Albion writers, and I would like to thank them all sincerely for their support.To our readers: we hope that you like our new look, and will bookmark albionmagazineonline.org! Those of you who are looking for our old articles will be reassured to know that all the webpages from the former site are backed up.They will reappear in the Archive section of the site, starting with the most recent, until every back issue is available again.
There has also been another significant change, namely that before the crash we decided to revert to our old Winter/Summer instead of Spring/Autumn publication schedule. In future, editions will come out at regular biannual intervals.
Now, finally, to the current edition.It has been a fantastic year for art events so far, and this summer we profile three of them.To begin with, Paul Flux was one of the fortunate few admitted to see Antony Gormley’s new installation ROOM at the Beaumont Hotel, a fascinating piece of work which raises challenging questions about the relationship between art and the public.To add to the excitement, Mark Jones surveys the recreation of William Blake’s artistic development at the Ashmolean, and I battle the crowds at the Dulwich Picture Gallery's startlingly popular Ravilious retrospective.Also in Art, Mark takes on the obscure but fascinating topic of Victorian social realism in his review of a recent book on the subject.Regular readers will also notice an innovation in this edition, the introduction of a Theatre section, in which Steve Cox evaluates a new play on English teenage culture in the immediate postwar period and the ways in which it interacted with the popular depiction of America.
The Books section also contains a brace of articles, including an analytical essay by Mary Thaler on the unusual commitment to realism in Dorothy Sayers’ detective stories.I was fortunate enough to recently visit the inspiration for L. M. Boston’s Green Knowe books, the Manor House in the tiny village of Hemingford Grey, and to compare the eerily unchanged house with its representation in the stories.(Thanks go to Diana Boston for her comments on an earlier draft of this article.)Neil Jackson continues his investigations of psychogeographical literature with an entertaining review of Scarp by Nick Papadimitriou, and rediscovers Douglas Dunn's poetry collection Terry Street, which evokes working class life in sixties Hull.
In music, James Turner looks at a wide variety of new releases and reissues, including albums from Joan Armatrading, Sky, and Tom Slatter, whileEm Marshall-Luck critiques numerous recordings of music by Elgar and Walton, among others.So, all in all, a fairly robust edition, given the circumstances.Happy reading, and until next winter! --The Editor