NICK MATTHEWS welcomes the return of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s music to the repertoire of this years’ Three Choirs Festival
Mexico’s Soviet kiss
GAVIN O’TOOLE recommends a book that examines the ‘invisible’ cultural cross-fertilisation that has bypassed the globalisation peddled by the West
Lolita Torres in A fiance for Laura, 1955
[Public Domain] 
LEO BOIX reviews a caustic novel of resistance and womanhood by Buenos Aires-born Lucia Lijtmaer, and an electrifying poetry collection by Chilean Vicente Huidobro
MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
Romancing Yesenia: How a Mexican Melodrama Shaped Global Popular Culture
by Masha Salazkina
University of California Press, £25
WHY would a mother in the Soviet Union of the early 1960s as it clawed its way out of the darkness of Stalinism into a new dawn name her daughter Lolita — and not Audrey, Marilyn, Lucille or Debbie?
After all, the latter were setting aflame the passions of the Western world as Hollywood starlets became the face of a new form of cinema extending US cultural imperialism and the “American way of life” across the globe.
Similar stories
JOHN GREEN surveys the remarkable career of screenwriter Malcolm Hulke and the essential part played by his membership of the Communist Party
Global South governments’ sovereignty and ability to decide future economic policy are severely compromised by signing free trade agreements, whose terms are heavily weighted in favour of the already wealthy countries of the global North, writes BERT SCHOUWENBURG
STEVEN ANDREW welcomes the third instalment of autobiography by a libertarian socialist whose political work is charged with Gramscian realism
CHRISTINE LINDEY marvels at a history of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR