Sybil & Cyril: Cutting through Time

Description

'A joy to read.' Sunday Times 'Outstanding.' Daily Telegraph 'Excellent.' The Spectator 'Superb.' Literary Review 'Scintillating . . . A gripping, mysterious love story which also sheds light on British culture between the wars.' Financial Times In 1922, Cyril Power, a fifty-year-old architect, left his family to work with the twenty-four-year-old Sybil Andrews. They would be together for twenty years. Both became famous for their dynamic, modernist linocuts - streamlined, full of movement and brilliant colour, summing up the hectic interwar years. Theirs was a scintillating world of Futurists, Surrealists and pioneering abstraction, but alongside the buzz of the new, of machines and speed, shops and sport and dance, they also looked back, to medieval myths and early music, to country ways disappearing from sight.

Jenny Uglow grew up in Cumbria. A former Editorial Director of Chatto & Windus, she is the author of prize-winning biographies and cultural histories, from The Lunar Men: the Friends who made the Future (2002) to In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815 (2014). Her interest in text and image is explored in Words and Pictures: Writers, Artists and a Peculiarly British Tradition (2008), and in biographies of William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, Walter Crane and most recently in Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense, winner of the Hawthornden Prize in 2018. She was created an OBE in 2008, and was Chair of the Royal Society of Literature 2014-2016. She lives in Canterbury and Borrowdale, Cumbria.