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Front Row: Stanley Spencer's wives, the damage to culture in Beirut, Angie Cruz

19/08/2020

Stanley Spencer's wives, the damage to culture in Beirut, Angie Cruz

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Stanley Spencer's wives, the damage to culture in Beirut, Angie Cruz

The Wives of Stanley Spencer, the destruction of arts and culture in Beirut.

Love, Art, Loss: The Wives of Stanley Spencer; the cultural destruction of Beirut; novelist Angie Cruz.

The Wives of Stanley Spencer are the subject of a new exhibition Love, Art, Loss at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, Berkshire. Artist and illustrator Siân Pattenden reviews. 

The explosion in Beirut two weeks destroyed thousands of buildings in the Lebanese city, including many of the art galleries and museums. Sursock Museum Director Zeina Arida and gallery owner Saleh Barakat consider the damage done to the city's culture as well as its infrastructure.  

Continuing Front Row's interviews with all the authors shortlisted for this year's Women's Prize for Fiction,Angie Cruz discusses her novel Dominicana. Ana is a schoolgirl muddling through adolescence on a small farm in the Dominican Republic, but her mother marries her off to a man twice her age, whom she sees as the ticket to America for the whole family. Ana, fifteen, with no English, no money and no autonomy, arrives on a false passport to begin a new life in cold, grey New York. 

Presenter Samira Ahmed
Producer Jerome Weatherald

Image above: Portrait of Patricia Preece, 1933 by Stanley Spencer

(C) Estate Stanley Spencer & Bridgeman Images, London
Courtesy Southampton City Art Gallery

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