What connects landscape with branding? Capitalism has come along and found a way to imbue the former with the qualities of the latter. Why? In order that someone makes a buck or two? Naturally. But...

"The Roots of Culture, the Power of Art. The First Sixty Years of the Canada Council for the Arts." Cultural Trends, 27(2), pp. 147–148

"Regenerating regional culture: a study of the international book town movement." Cultural Trends, 27(4), pp. 308–309

Caitlin DeSilvey has written a pleasant and thought provoking book. It is at turns travelogue, contemplation, field notebook, dispatches from the heritage front line. At times it even takes a turn ...

I’m one of those strange people that inhabits the world in between academia, public policy, and the cultural sector. My work requires me to be a diplomat, a missionary, and a translator. I was ther...

Jonathan Meades's varied career as a novelist, critic and broadcaster has never really attracted academic attention. This is a shame. In the last 10 years a UK audience has seen him presenting genr...

Four personal observations on Corbyn’s policy document, The Arts (2015). Each contributor has taken his or her own approach to reflecting on what this document tells us about how Jeremy Corbyn might approach cultural policy, should he ever find himself in Downing Street. What is noticeable across all of these observations is the degree to which each of the writers feels that they have “heard it all before”. Whether it was in the 1970s, the 1990s, in the promises of another party or in the pages of another report, publicly backing the arts appears to be a tactic that many of those offering a new political direction have chosen to adopt. This raises two questions. First why, when it comes to arts policy, the majority of these supposed radicals revert to primarily offering more of the same? And second, why do so many of those in the cultural sector who present themselves as the vanguard of progressive politics seem so keen to support pro- posed cultural policies that in their familiarity are so conservative?

If one were engaged in the wearisome task of anthologising cultural policy grey literature, This England would warrant inclusion, joining such unlikely bedfellows as John Maynard Keynes' 1945 Liste...