CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence
Politically illiterate biography of a great working-class writer
RURAL IDYLL: DH Lawrence (right) in West Berkshire, 1919
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
YOU wouldn’t know from Frances Wilson’s biography of DH Lawrence that he came into his vocation as a writer at the same time as the Great Unrest, the massive strike wave that shook Britain from 1910 to 1914.
Nor that his tortured experience of wartime England included awareness of the Russian Revolution nor, as the son of a miner, that he even noticed the Triple Alliance strikes of miners, transport workers and railwaymen in 1919 and 1921.
Wilson's Lawrence has no political awareness and this absence is a painful omission. It is typical of the class-blind misreadings that have distorted the reputation of England’s ever-controversial and first professional working-class writer.
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