Peyton Skipwith
Le Génie du Désordre
Walter Sickert was the single most significant figure to bestride the British art scene for the half-century that separated the 1880s &m the 1930s. He liked bestriding and declaiming - activities he had readily engaged in during hs early years on the stage with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry at the Lyceum. He was reckless, feckless, profligate, selfish, witty, provocative and promiscuous - part enfant terrible, part overgrown schoolboy. Born in Munich, the son of a Danish father and a French-educated English mother, he always regarded hmself as an outsider. As the eldest and most charismatic of the six children of Oswald and Nellie Sickert (who was the illegitimate daughter of the Reverend Richard Sheepshanks), he was regarded by his siblings, and others, as - 'a fickle leader with no sense of responsibility to hs followers' - early traits which grew more exaggerated as the years passed.
There has been no biography of Sickert since Denys Sutton's rather unsatisfactory life was published in 1976, but in the intervening years there have been major exhibitions of his work at the Hayward Gallery, the Royal Academy, Abbot Hall, the Whitworth Art Gallery and the Fine Art Society, accompanied by
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'For all his reputation as the great theorist of democracy, Tocqueville was never an enthusiast for universal suffrage or the kind of electoral politics that went with it.'
Alan Ryan asks what Alexis de Tocqueville's ideas can teach us today.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/oui-the-people
'Within two days of arriving at the retreat, he is called away to attend the funeral of a friend killed in the Charlie Hebdo attacks ... Carrère is soon divorced and suicidal, interned in a psychiatric institution where he must slowly rebuild his life.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/lunge-twist-pose
'Foreign-policy pundits, then as now, tended to lack subtlety, even if they could be highly articulate about a nation they did not like very much.'
Read Lucy Wooding's review of Clare Jackson's 'Devil-Land', which has won the @WolfsonHistory prize.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-view-from-across-the-channel