Editorial Welcome to the summer edition of Albion, which finds us in an upbeat mood. Not only did the football go much better than we (at any rate) had hoped, we are delighted to welcome a new writer: Kate Morton comes from the Midlands and contributes a review of the lovely new nature book Of Thorn & Briar by Paul Lamb, a thoughtful exploration of the ancient craft of hedging (boundaries, not bets).
The matter of Albion in the Blakeian sense, an exploration of the country’s ancient culture and its capacity to heal the fractured present by bringing people together, is the subject of the new book Finding Albion by Zakia Sewell. Sewell’s Caribbean heritage on her mother’s side gives her a distinctive perspective on this subject matter, and Caribbean identity also features in the artist Hurvin Anderson’s work, showcased in the current Tate Modern exhibition and examined by Paul Flux for its complex insights into the two islands —England and Jamaica— that dominate Anderson’s work. Paul also meets up with one of his great artistic heroes, the London artist Doreen Fletcher, whose recent exhibition at Town House, Spitalfields captured her ability to find the ineffable in apparently ordinary cityscapes. The impact of the First World War on the work of William Nicholson, as modernist in his own understated way as more experimental artists but also the illustrator of The Velveteen Rabbit, is explored during Paul’s visit to the Pallant House Gallery’s Nicholson retrospective. In Books, Paul is ultimately won over by the premise of Sussex Modernism by Hope Wolf, which demonstrates that there really was a lot of modernist activity in Sussex during the period before the Second World War.
Television includes Neil Jackson’s appreciative analysis of Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May fifty years on, in which two insufferable suburbanites create havoc on a camping trip in rural Dorset. It is a tragicomic holiday to rival Withnail and I’s disastrous Lakes excursion and illustrates that, even if your holiday is carefully planned and you definitely did not go on it by mistake, it can still all go pear-shaped. Also in Television, James finds much to enjoy in the initially-doubted SNLUK, which has adapted the American sketch show’s format to English comedy themes with surprising success —notably an already-legendary satire of the disturbing 1984 British Pork advert.
Finally, in Music James is delighted by the inclusion of progressive rock in this year’s Proms concerts in arrangements for full classical orchestra, highlighting the classical inspiration behind the genre in a selection of famous pieces, including Jethro Tull’s Living in the Past.
Enjoy the rest of the summer, and see you again early next year.--The Editor
