RaveThe Telegraph (UK)Outstanding ... Sybil & Cyril, then, brings a remarkable relationship to life, along with the remarkable era in which it blossomed. In Uglow’s deft and practised hands...Britain’s interwar years feel near transcendent: a hectic, humming, scintillating swirl filled with excitement and unease, experiment and anarchy, machines, speed, colour and people ... Uglow conveys beautifully how lino’s pliable surface produced an exceptionally expressive stroke; one that implied the hurtle and whoosh, the heaving scramble and the sheer disorientating strangeness of the age like nothing else ... Throughout, I was struck by the intensely visual prose, which makes the reader feel like they are flicking through a colourful sketchbook ... Even though the book is ostensibly about art, its characters come charmingly to life in their love of music.
Sally Mann
RaveThe TelegraphThe kind of photographer she is comes under just as strange and piercing a scrutiny in this exceptional chronicle. More than that, she confronts herself – motives and transgressions, loves and losses – with an intelligence that can be as distressing as it is impressive, all of it leavened by her pin-sharp wit ... The stories in this book are the stuff of novels, and Mann brings her photographer’s eye to the striking visual vignettes ... Mann is at her most eloquent when considering the Southern landscape and its \'flawed human heart.\' Its \'vine hung dirt roads,\' \'soft pulpy vowels\' and \'death-inflected soil\' weigh heavily in the book, as if she can’t quite resolve the love she feels for it with its great contradiction, \'the splendour of a lost world founded on a monstrous crime.\'
