The Bard stands with the Reformers of Peterloo, and their shared genius in teaching history with music and song
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A painter of paradox
CHRISTINE LINDEY is struck by the creative complexity of Aubrey Williams's enigmatic and powerfully realised paintings
Aubrey Williams's Symphony
SUE TURNER is fascinated by a book that researches who the largely immigrant workforce were that built the Empire State
MARIA DUARTE and MALC McGOOKIN review Sirat, The Testament of Ann Lee, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, and All You Need Is Kill
STEVE ANDREW recommends a Marxist analysis of the long chains of production that global corporations exploit
MARY CONWAY relishes the period detail but misses the drama in this unsatisfactory dramatisation of the subjugated life of George Eliot
IAN SINCLAIR welcomes a mainstream scholar to the ranks of left-wing critique of US foreign policy
PETER MASON is disappointed that the eponymous Count fails to put in an appearance
WHEN Aubrey Williams (1926-1990) arrived in London in 1952 to further his art education, he immersed himself in the contemporary Western art that he had only seen in reproduction in his native Guyana.
By the mid-1950s, like so many others, he fell under the spell of American abstract expressionism, then being promoted covertly by the CIA as the freest and most “advanced” form of expression. But a lifelong refusal to be aesthetically boxed in prompted him to also continue painting figuratively and sometimes to blur the boundaries between the two.
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