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Writers should be free to express their opinions – not strangled by Stasi-like ‘diversity’ rules
Arts critics are being warned by the union Equity to watch what they say. Whatever the intentions, it’s a sinister, anti-free speech move
29 April 2021 • 5:00am
Critically isolated: writers and journalists, says Ben Lawrence, shouldn t be ordered to conform to industry pressure
Credit: Getty
Last week, the acting union Equity delivered a new set of guidelines for theatre critics. Among its recommendations was that critics should consider their ethnicity and relative privilege when writing their reviews. The union urged that they “avoid referring to immutable characteristics such as age, race, gender and appearance, unless such characteristics directly affect the production’s meaning”. For a decade, I have been a critic across several art forms, including theatre, and while I hope that, out of fairness, I have always adhered to the above, I am appalled that Equity ar
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In the mid-19th century, Sir John Herschel invented the cyanotype, an intricate photographic process that uses iron compounds to create prints with a lustrous blue hue. His close friend Anna Atkins, an amateur botanist who took particular interest in scientific illustration and taxonomy, decided to use the new technique to document algae from her extensive seaweed collection, resulting in ethereal, highly detailed illustrations rendered in wispy shades of white set against a radiant cyan background, also known as Prussian Blue. She then published her works in
Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, widely considered to be the first book illustrated with photographic images. Cyanotypes became a simple, low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, commonly referred to as blueprints.