ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
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‘The main task is, indeed, to awaken the women’s class consciousness and to incorporate them into the class struggle’ - Clara Zetkin
MICHAL BONCZA rounds up a series of images designed to inspire women
Liberty Leading the People, Eugene Delacroix; Rupert Garcia, Libertad Para Los Prisoneras Politicas! Freedom for political prisoners!, 1971, featuring Angela Davis who was held in a Manhattan prison at the times
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MICK McSHANE rubs shoulders with Mod legend Steve Craddock and joins in with the joyous Glasgow choir
DENNIS BROE sifts out the ideological bias of the newest TV series offerings, and picks out what to see, and what to avoid
ONE of the most enduring revolutionary images in Western art is that of Liberty Leading the People painted by Eugene Delacroix in the Autumn of 1830 as a response to the July revolution of the same year, which saw France swap the House of Bourbon for the House of Orleans, an error that was only corrected in 1848 with the founding of the Second Republic.
The figure of Liberty is popularly referred to as “Marianne,” which symbolises, in popular consciousness, both ordinary people and the manifestation of their political aspirations: the Republic. The boy next to her with two pistols is believed to have inspired Gavroche in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.
The allegory of the female figure is rooted in language — in French, France, Republic, Liberty and Reason are feminine nouns.
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MICHAL BONCZA recommends a compact volume that charts the art of propagating ideas across the 20th century
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