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New Statesman
a day ago
- General
- New Statesman
From Lore Segal to Jimi Famurewa: new books reviewed in short
The Manifesto House by Owen Hopkins Almost all houses, says the architectural historian Owen Hopkins, reflect 'received ideas' ingrained in architects, planning bodies, regulations and clients 'about how houses are designed and built in particular places at particular moments in time'. Manifesto houses, on the other hand, embody new theories, utilise innovative techniques and materials, and represent self-contained visions for how we could live. In his handsome, illustrated survey, Hopkins presents 21 houses that have shifted the nature of what architecture can be. Nearly all are 20th-century buildings, although Hopkins starts with Palladio's 16th-century Villa Rotonda before ticking off the familiar likes of Le Corbusier (Villa Savoye), Frank Lloyd Wright (Fallingwater) and Mies van der Rohe (Farnsworth House). More interesting, because less familiar, are buildings such as Sou Fujimoto's House NA in Tokyo (2012), a series of irregularly stacked glass boxes that blur the boundary between nature and architecture, and Anupama Kundoo's Wall House (2000), which transposes the artisanal ethos of Arts and Crafts houses to rural India. Hopkins's hope is that the ideas embedded in some of these structures will have a beneficial effect not just on architecture but on wider society. Yale University Press, 240pp, £30. Buy the book By Michael Prodger Her First American by Lore Segal The New York Times has described Lore Segal as 'coming closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel' with Her First American – now published in a UK edition for the first time, 40 years after it appeared in the US. Its story follows an Austrian Jewish refugee, Ilka Weissnix, who arrives in New York City in the early 1950s only to come across fellow immigrants. Her search for a 'real American' takes her on a train journey south, where she meets one – Carter Bayoux, a black intellectual – with whom she begins an affair. But this isn't a simple love story – it's a nuanced narrative of the immigrants who shaped New York and how the US has shaped them. Ilka details her personal experiences of alienation, anti-Semitism awhile observing the deep wounds of racism in America. Thanks to Carter's connections, she attends Jewish weddings, satirical African-American shows and holidays with her lover's friends, both black and Jewish, in moments of solidarity between the two cultures. Both groups move forward constantly looking over their shoulders – it is these people that are the 'real Americans' moulding the country into its current form. Sort of Books, 304pp, £10.99. Buy the book By Zuzanna Lachendro Picky by Jimi Famurewa In Picky, Jimi Famurewa revisits the culinary terrain of his youth to map the contours of identity, memory and belonging. The Evening Standard 's chief restaurant critic threads his evolution from a boy who pocketed mashed potato to a literal arbiter of taste, unpacking the politics of it all along the way. School lunches become metaphor for institutional imposition; a bowl of jollof rice defiant reclamation. As a British-Nigerian man, the author's 'scrambled identity' becomes both the text and subtext of a life navigated between cultural poles. Famurewa is sharpest when teasing out how personal pickiness can belie greater truths about identity, like when a fellow student at school steals lunch not because they are a bully, but rather their mother has neither the time nor money to pack them one. Food is a code – social, familial, psychological – and his questions about what it means to belong are asked not in abstractions, but in mouthfuls. Picky is thoughtful, bubbly and honest, and Famurewa does well to exhume painful memories with a light touch. His prose drips like beef fat on chips: it's rich, if not at times a little indulgent. But his book reminds us that caring about what we eat is not about self-gratification but self-formation. Hodder & Stoughton, 384pp, £20. Buy the book By Zoë Huxford Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night by Gethan Dick Genre-wise, large tracts of the Irish writer Gethan Dick's debut novel, Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night, could be described as gentle apocalypse. Or softcore Armageddon, perhaps. Society has collapsed after plague and war, but while wolves do howl and marauders do maraude, such menaces feel distinctly remote. Consequently, the book opens to strange and tender emotions. A band of neighbours team up and resolve to cycle from their shattered south London street to southern France. But they don't flee in panic. They leave only once they've lain on their home beds long enough to feel ready to abandon them forever. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe One character cannot reconcile himself to the new world, insisting that one day 'the clock would run backwards and it would once again be the time of beer in taps and burgers in freezers and bread in packets and milk in cartons'. So held 'by the solidity of how things had been', he cannot understand they will never be that way again. These quiet melancholies of a slow calamity give the reader pause – especially as Dick nudges us to ask if we're in one already. Tramp Press, 220pp, £13.99. Buy the book By George Monaghan [See also: On freedom vs motherhood] Related
Hans India
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Hans India
Manjeet Singh on the Rise of Tattoo Culture in India: Art, Identity, and a Growing Industry
India's tattoo culture is experiencing a renaissance, transitioning from underground subculture to a thriving creative industry. At the heart of this transformation is New Delhi-based veteran artist Manjeet Singh — known in the tattoo world as Manjeet Tattooz. With over 18 years in the field, Singh has witnessed the evolution firsthand. 'Fifteen years ago, tattooing in India was viewed as a foreign concept, or something linked to rebellion,' he reflects. 'Today, it's part of mainstream culture — it's fashion, faith, remembrance, and identity all in one.' Singh's journey began far from the tattoo needle. Born in 1976, he started as a teenage painter of Bollywood film posters in the 1990s — a craft that demanded scale, realism, and detail. His transition to tattooing was sparked by his exposure to international art and shows like Miami Ink. Entirely self-taught, Singh entered the profession in 2007, blending his fine art background with innovative tattoo techniques. Today, his work is celebrated for its black-and-grey realism, portraiture, and religious symbolism, especially Sikh iconography. 'Young people today are not afraid to express themselves visually,' he says of the cultural shift. 'They see tattoos not just as designs, but as personal narratives. That's a big shift from earlier.' India's tattoo market is now valued at over ₹300 crore, buoyed by global exposure, social media, and a younger, more expressive generation. Singh credits platforms like Instagram for raising both visibility and standards. 'Earlier, people would come in with little idea of what they wanted. Now, many arrive with research, references, and clear intent.' His work has gained international recognition, with a tattoo of Salvador Dalí featured in The World Atlas of Tattoos (Yale University Press). Singh has won accolades including Best Portrait Tattoo at India's 2nd International Tattoo Convention and holds a Guinness World Record. Despite international acclaim, Singh remains grounded in India. 'There's something very rooted about working here. The stories, the beliefs — they're different. And that's what I want to reflect in my work.' His celebrity clientele spans Punjabi music stars like Himanshi Khurana and Jordan Sandhu to sports icons like Harbhajan Singh. Yet, Singh maintains that the heart of his practice lies in personal storytelling and mentoring younger artists. He regularly conducts workshops on hygiene and ethics in tattooing. 'There's still a long way to go in India when it comes to regulation, safety, and standard training,' he notes. 'But we're in a much better place than we were ten years ago.' Singh's impact goes beyond ink. Whether it's collecting antique coins or collaborating with regional studios to uplift local talent, his mission is clear: to shape India's tattoo industry with authenticity and purpose. 'India's tattoo story is still being written,' he says. 'And I'm proud to be part of that chapter.'
New Statesman
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Vanessa Bell, the mother of British modernism
One of artist Vanessa Bell's earliest memories of her sister, Virginia Woolf, was the future writer asking Bell 'which I liked best, my father or my mother.' Vanessa was the elder of the two girls, but they were both young enough to be 'jumping around naked' in the bathroom. Bell's preference was for her mother. Woolf, meanwhile, analysed her own feelings before choosing their father. Bell was 40 when she recalled the incident in a letter: 'Such a question seemed to me rather terrible – surely one ought not to ask it… If one could criticise one's parents, what or whom could one not criticise? Dimly some freedom of thought and speech seemed born.' The conversation was a 'turning point' in the sisters' relationship, writes Wendy Hitchmouth in a new biography of Bell. Vanessa and Virginia had begun to plot an escape out of their strict Victorian upbringing into the realm of the provocative. The role of the home looms large in Vanessa Bell, The Life and Art of a Bloomsbury Radical (Yale University Press). Hitchmouth is more familiar than most with Bell's best-known residence, the pastel-hued Charleston House in the Sussex Downs: she was the curator there for 12 years. This is her second book on the early 20th-century group of artists, writers and thinkers in as many years, following 2023's The Bloomsbury Look, and in it she puts Bell on a new podium: not as the overlooked sister of Woolf's or lover of artists Duncan Grant and Roger Fry, but as the mother of British modernism. It's a bold move, not least because – as Hitchmouth intricately unpicks throughout the biography – Bell spent her lifetime hiding her light under a bushel. But this, Hitchmouth convincingly argues, was all part of the plan. Woolf and Bell grew up in the stiff gloom of Hyde Park Gate, against a backdrop of academia, mourning and suggested childhood sexual abuse. But while they escaped it for still-radical lives dedicated to writing, art, polyamory and beauty, Bell maintained and manipulated certain trappings of Edwardian womanhood to further her career and fuel her lifestyle. One of the many portraits of Bell by Duncan Grant depicts how she is remembered by art history. She lies in a hammock next to the pond at Charleston. At her feet lies a man, reading and a boy, her middle child, Quentin, rocking her. Bell and Grant's daughter Angelica, her youngest, pulls a small toy dog along the garden path, barefoot. Her eldest child Julian is alone in a rowing boat in the distance. Bell, in a pink dress and headscarf, has her feet and arms crossed, her head back, gazing into the distance; part-hippy mum, part exhaustion, both central and removed from it all. She was the big sister nicknamed 'The Saint' by her siblings, who raised the Stephens children after their mother and step-sister died. The woman who nursed Woolf during her well-reported depressions. The mother of three, who couldn't stop her daughter from unwittingly marrying her real father's former lover. All of these biographical details are attended to in Hitchmouth's biography, but what they are revealed as a facade to a woman whose determination and dynamism was overlooked. Hitchmouth transcribed some 1,500 unpublished letters from Bell to dig into the minutiae of effort that lies behind the gatherings, exhibitions and publications that make cultural movements happen. The ordering of the canvas and the booking of venues, the sending of invitations and liaising with picture editors, the arranging of models and wooing of cultural grandees. Bell did it all, and then said the men she worked among were responsible for it. There were reasons for this, Hitchmouth explains: 'In the public domain, Vanessa's upbringing instilled in her an enduring semblance of passivity.' When Leonard Woolf – who would later marry Virginia – first met the sisters during a visit to their brother Thoby at Cambridge, he recalled that 'they hardly spoke'. The Stephens sisters may have come from enough money to enable their creative freedom after their parents' premature deaths, but they carried the gendered baggage their male contemporaries didn't. As Hitchmouth writes: 'Vanessa internalised the prejudices that limited her career.' Perhaps this is why, even in her own words (Bell was a vivid and witty writer, although she denied this), she shrugged off her efforts. Perhaps she was just self-effacing. Probably both. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe In Bell's memoirs, the weekly late-night bohemian she hosted at Gordon Square in her early twenties, effectively forming The Bloomsbury Group, are described as happening when 'one or two of these friends began to drift in'. But she had made invitations and introductions, she had purposefully shaken off the strictures of Victorian socialising for whisky and biscuits at midnight. She hung pictures strategically in the hallway, knowing the impression they would make. Bell did the same with The Friday Club, the Omega Workshops (comparing the running of them, entertainingly, to 'ordering dinner'), painterly gatherings at country houses in Sussex and Studland and the South of France and, of course, Charleston. Bell not only hosted the Bloomsbury Group, she invented its ways of being and brought it together, and over the decades that work was forgotten. Hitchmouth also demonstrates the convoluted mechanics of Bell getting away with living the personal life she wanted. Her in-laws never visited Charleston, where she lived with Grant, because they assumed she and Clive had a normal marriage. The past decade has seen art history attempt to re-establish Bell; The Dulwich Picture Gallery retrospective in 2017 was her first – she died in 1961. A subsequent, more recent, show at Milton Keynes gallery reached the pages of the New York Times. It feels, now, that we are comfortable in naming her among the first British artists to play with abstractism. Still, Hitchmouth is insistent on Bell's pioneering approaches: she writes that Bell made cut-outs before Matisse and dripped paint before Pollock. Her abstract paintings appeared while Mondrian was still a Neo-Plasticist. Nobody, Hitchmouth claims, had coloured walls like she had before. As for Woolf's much-feted room of one's own? Bell got there first by setting up their sororal home to have a separate living and working space apiece. Sometimes these proclamations of invention are so smuggled into a text rich with names and dates and artworks that I wondered if they deserved more bolstering. What is undeniable is that the hundreds of works she made alongside other artists, first through the Omega Workshops – where work was deliberately anonymous – and then later through her decades-long partnership with Grant, was mostly unattributed. Grant outlived Bell and, in her wake, entertained art dealers, collectors and historians, some of whom encouraged him to retrospectively sign pieces that could have been made by either of them, sometimes in biro. With it, Bell's efforts were made invisible. Woolf wrote the forewords for Bell's 1930s solo shows. In one of them she interrogated the patriarchy that both had worked to navigate throughout their careers. After working through the contradictions of Bell being both masculine and feminine, interested in children but 'equally interested in rocks', able to make clothes but also being a fan of nudity, Woolf concludes that Bell is 'not a woman at all, but a mixture of Goddess and peasant, treading the clouds with her feet and with her hands shelling peas'. It's a passage that demonstrates both the deep and complex affinity the sisters shared and the enormity of Bell's creative output and ways of being. It's this enormity that Hitchmouth's biography struggles with; sometimes we lose sight of who Bell was as a woman under the abundance of her achievements, the many people she was connected to, the homes and exhibitions and artworks she created. Huge life events are glimpsed: Woolf's affair with her brother-in-law, Clive Bell, and Vanessa's revelation of Virginia's letters about it to Woolf's husband, for instance. The death of Bell's beloved son Julian during the Spanish Civil War. We learn that Quentin's infant illness prevented Bell from exhibiting at a history-making exhibition in Paris, and provided an important connection in her relationship with Roger Fry ('he knew what it felt like to have one's baby ill'), but not on how it affected her more broadly. I was curious as to where the children were, and how Bell felt about them, as she bounded from home to home, lover to lover, experiment to experiment. Hitchmouth's biography is revelatory about the strength and compassion of sisterhood between Woolf and Bell – which for so long has been positioned as an uneven rivalry – but I was left hankering for more of the intimacy of their letters. And it is through Woolf's eyes that we get the best understanding of Bell as a person. Not as a saint or a painted matriarch or a lover, but a woman, clever and conniving to make not just a life of modernity, but a movement. And through this cacophony of letters, connections and history, Hitchmouth gives Bell back the identity Woolf remembers her sister having. That of the person who, as a child 'scrawl[ed] on a black door a great maze of lines, with white chalk. 'When I am a famous painter – ' she began, and then turned shy and rubbed it out in her capable way.' Related
Axios
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
New book tackles the legend of Jim from Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn"
A new book unpacks Jim in Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" — a fictional enslaved Black man who is one of the most memorable characters in American Literature. Why it matters: For more than a century, Jim has been a source of sympathy, ridicule, anger, and protest due to the Black dialect he uses throughout the novel, but scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin says that he's been misunderstood. The big picture: " Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade," released last month by Yale University Press, comes out amid renewed interest in the Twain character. Percival Everett recently won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel, "James," which reimagines Jim from an illiterate enslaved man as often portrayed to a savvy and literate soul who has more agency. Fishkin tells Axios she wanted to explore how we've viewed Jim throughout the decades and how he has shaped American culture. The text in Twain's classic hasn't changed throughout the years, "but we've changed," said Fishkin, one of the world's top Twain scholars. Catch up quick: " The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" tells the story of Huck, a young, uneducated white boy, and Jim, an escaped slave, as they travel together down the Mississippi River on a raft. The pair must avoid mobs of slave hunters and robbers along their journey and develop a sense of care for one another. The book uses racist epithets of the time, and Jim speaks in a language that critics say today resembles offensive minstrel shows in the late 1800s — all of which have generated demands for the novel to be banned. Yes, but: Fishkin says Twain was being subversive in the use of Jim's dialect and criticizing all the racist stereotypes with a humanized portrayal. "Jim is the smartest character in the book. It's a mistake to assume he's there to be ridiculed. In fact, he becomes a father to Huck," says Fishkin, who wrote the 1993 literature critic classic, "Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voice." Fishkin says Jim is a complex character who is really the first Black father portrayed in American literature. Zoom in: In her new book, Fishkin takes on the historical myths and models of Black men in post-Civil War America. She then gives us a rundown of the debates of Jim and the novel's use of racist language that have generated pushback from liberals and conservatives. Fishkin then presents the reader with an innovative exercise in one chapter, exploring what Jim would say about everything in his own dialect. She ends with a lesson on how some high school teachers are presenting the book today and what lessons can be learned when the book "is taught correctly."
New Statesman
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
From Philippe Sands to Simon Park: new books reviewed in short
Wreckers: Disaster in the Age of Discovery by Simon Park According to Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, the discoveries of America and a passage to the East Indies by Columbus and Vasco da Gama were 'the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind'. What wasn't recorded quite so diligently were the disasters, privations, deaths and sheer haplessness that accompanied the 16th-century voyages into the unknown. In this rollicking but reflective account of those early sorties, the Oxford historian Simon Park presents an alternative view of the 'action-hero version of history'. Wreckers is about the mariners who ended up 'kidnapped, stranded, abandoned and betrayed' in the pursuit of personal wealth and national glory and of the numerous attempts at colonisation that failed. Park is an adroit storyteller and makes the most of his picaresque stories, such as that of the German explorer Hans Staden, taken captive by the Tupinambá people of Brazil who kept him in a state of permanent fear with threats of eating him, and Martin Frobisher, who sought the North-West Passage but returned defeated with nothing more than a hold full of rocks. Empire-building, says Park, was not 'unstoppable' but uncertain. By Michael Prodger Viking, 368pp, £25. Buy the book The Dream Factory: London's First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare by Daniel Swift Walking down London's West End, it's hard to imagine the capital without a single theatre. But theatre-less London did exist – until 1576 when the city's first ever playhouse was erected in Shoreditch. Daniel Swift's The Dream Factory traces the remarkable history of the aptly named playhouse, the Theatre, thanks to numerous litigations associated with the family behind it – the Burbages. Without James Burbage and the Theatre two significant parts of the history of theatre would be missing: Shakespeare and the Globe. Shakespeare began his writing in the Burbages' playhouse. It was here that A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet were written, and the son of James Burbage, Richard, is thought to have inspired many well-known Shakespearean characters. Deftly navigating social politics, the plague and preachers wishing for the Theatre's downfall, Swift tells its history in the most original way. The Burbages' dramatic life truly was well suited to their industry. By Zuzanna Lachendro Yale University Press, 320pp, £25. Buy the book 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands Calle Londres intersects Calle París in central Santiago. Once a place of the elite, it was revitalised by cultural and political figures in the mid-20th century. Calle Londres 38, after which the bestselling author Philippe Sands' latest book is titled, was an unassuming house – until the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Under Pinochet, Londres 38 was turned into the detention and torture centre of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA). Sands' 38 Londres Street is a gripping blend of memoir, investigative journalism and courtroom drama, with a narrative spanning decades and thousands of miles. It includes his own involvement as a barrister for a human rights organisation during the 1998 arrest of Pinochet in London, and his discovery of personal links to those affected by the dictator's regime and to the murders of Walther Rauff, the Nazi behind the gas vans used to kill thousands of Jews. Speaking to lawyers involved in Pinochet's later trial, Chileans affected by DINA's torture and disappearances and those who knew Rauff (after he settled in the city of Punta Arenas), Sands convincingly makes a connection between Pinochet's regime and the Nazi in exile. Most importantly, he shows why the dictatorship must not be tucked away into the past. By Zuzanna Lachendro Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 480pp, £25. Buy the book The Fall of the House of Montagu by Robert Wainwright On 24 January 2017, Alexander Montagu, the 13th Duke of Manchester, was sentenced to prison in Nevada for a melange of offences. He served 14 months in jail. Shortly before he committed a burglary, in 2016, he made a visit to his ancestral seat, Kimbolton Castle, and visited the family crypt, where his father and grandparents are buried. He was only a guest, however: the estate is now the home of a public school. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 'How did it come to this?' you might ask, and if you did Robert Wainwright is your man. His new book closes with Alexander's sorry tale, the most recent tragedy in the decline and dissolution of a family first granted land by William the Conqueror. In some ways the story is typical: financial troubles thanks to mounting death duties; American heiress wives imported to maintain solvency; the eventual sale of the estate in a changing postwar landscape. But the Montagu story provides enough diverting specificities – bankruptcy, gambling dens and colonial exile – to make this a dramatic and pathos-inducing read. By Nicholas Harris Allen & Unwin, 352pp, £22. Buy the book [See also: Joan Didion without her style] Related
