London a La Mode

Fülszöveg

It was about 200 years ago that Paul Hogarth's illustrious forebear, William Hogarth, shocked fashionable society with his brilliant pictorial exposures of London's vice and luxury — 'The Rake's Progress', 'The Harlot's Progress', 'Marriage a la Mode' and other cycles. Paul Hogarth, referred to in the /Vew Statesman as 'Britain's best descriptive graphic artist', has taken these famous satirical prints as points of departure for his version of modern London. Through 150 of his finest drawings, accompanied by most pungent captions, he shows us a city which, though transformed, has in recent years witnessed an astonishing revival of the riotous gaiety of eighteenth-century England. The collaborator with Brendan Behan (in Brendati Behan's Island and Brendan Behan's New York) and with Robert Graves (in Majorca Observed) has reached new heights in this portrayal of the high life and low life of his own native capital.
Hogarth's images (divided into Morning, Noon, Evening, Night) are... Tovább

Fülszöveg

It was about 200 years ago that Paul Hogarth's illustrious forebear, William Hogarth, shocked fashionable society with his brilliant pictorial exposures of London's vice and luxury — 'The Rake's Progress', 'The Harlot's Progress', 'Marriage a la Mode' and other cycles. Paul Hogarth, referred to in the /Vew Statesman as 'Britain's best descriptive graphic artist', has taken these famous satirical prints as points of departure for his version of modern London. Through 150 of his finest drawings, accompanied by most pungent captions, he shows us a city which, though transformed, has in recent years witnessed an astonishing revival of the riotous gaiety of eighteenth-century England. The collaborator with Brendan Behan (in Brendati Behan's Island and Brendan Behan's New York) and with Robert Graves (in Majorca Observed) has reached new heights in this portrayal of the high life and low life of his own native capital.
Hogarth's images (divided into Morning, Noon, Evening, Night) are complemented by the accomplished prose of Malcolm Muggeridge, whose commentary shows clearly his own very different attitude to the London he knows so well. Where Hogarth is sometimes hard-hitting, sometimes almost irreverently sympathetic, Muggeridge is questioning and detached. He probes and analyses modern London with all the brilliance that he showed as Punch's revolutionary editor in the 1950's and that has made him recently one of the most liked, most dis-liked satirists - in the press and on television — on both sides of the Atlantic. The result is a rare partnership of exceptional drawings and incisive prose that truly capturestheunbridledvitalityof London today.
'The London of this book,'writes Paul Hogarth, 'is a complex jungle of nine million souls hellbent on the good things in life. An empire has
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been and gone, and the offices of departed power dot the West End lil<e carcases in a pasture of sl<yscrapers. To the East, the great warehouses line a Thames blackened with bygone filth. Once they were filled with gold and silks from India, sugar from the West Indies, timber and tobacco from North America. Now they are stuffed with detergents and pet-foods, and other necessities of a thriving consumer economy.
The idle and the industrious are with us as the industriously idle and the idly industrious. It is sometimes difficult to tell which is which. There are so many more of us now. Leisure from automation has created a boredom which for so many of us can only be dispelled by the constant pursuit of pleasure. And why not? So, London of the 1 960s has revived for all, and in good measure, the riotous gaiety and pungent contrasts of the 1760s. Only more so. Not only do we have good food, stylish clothes, vice and gambling, but our very own pop, striptease for everyman and organised crime.' Vissza