Recent Sussex-related publications.

William Hazlitt, distrustful of royal excess, dismissed Brighton’s Royal Pavilion as ‘a collection of stone pumpkins and pepper pots’. Alexandra Loske records the essayist’s disdain with ironic relish in her beautifully illustrated history and aesthetic analysis of the building where she works, titled The Royal Pavilion Brighton (Yale University Press).

Loske, a regular contributor to ROSA Magazine, is the head curator of the Pavilion, and a world expert on colour in art. In this authoritative-yet-accessible tome, subtitled ‘A Regency Palace of Colour and Sensation’ she brings George IV’s pleasure dome to life, from the inside, out.

She starts with the building’s exterior, which went through two incarnations, as George’s tastes shifted to reflect a national obsession with all-things-Orient at the beginning of the 19th century. Henry Holland’s Neo-classical version of the building, unveiled in 1787, was an elegant, but comparatively understated construct; John Nash’s exuberant oriental redesign, all onion domes and minarets, was completed in 1823 and is more or less what we see today, explains Loske.

The author takes us through this architectural timeline in some detail, aided by original plans and illustrations, notably 40 works on paper – aquatints, outline engravings, pencil drawings and lithographs – by Augustus Charles Pugin, created from 1817 to 1823. But it’s her thoughtful and elegant analysis of the Pavilion’s interior décor, fittings and furnishings, designed and collected by John and Frederick Crace and Robert Jones over the first three decades of the century – with significant input from George himself – that really brings this book to life.

Chapter two is dedicated to the chinoiserie style that dominates the interior; Loske emphasises that much of what we see is a very European interpretation of Chinese aesthetics, underpinned by French Neo-classical flourishes. At no point, alas, does she tell us exactly how many dragons there are in the building – whether two or three dimensional – but maybe that’s just a private obsession of this reviewer. There must be hundreds.

A further section merges Loske’s two major areas of expertise, as she describes the subtlety of the colour scheme of the Pavilion’s interiors, sadly faded after 200 years, but being steadily rejuvenated by the Pavilion’s hard-working restorers. She also evokes other sensations that the palace’s guests would have enjoyed: the smell of expensive perfume and fine French cuisine; the sounds of cheerful chatter and chamber music.

And, as Loske tells us in this definitive overview of the brightest jewel in Sussex’s architectural crown, George IV invited the great and the good of the day to party in his ‘playground by the sea’. None of them could fail to be impressed by its splendour, but not every visitor approved. Loske delights in The Duke of Wellington’s reported reaction: “Devil take me! I must have fallen into bad company.”

In his foreword to Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism 1933–1943 (Thames & Hudson), Francis Spalding makes what he calls a ‘shameful’ admission: until reading Andy Friend’s book, he had not realised that Vanessa Bell – subject of his own 380-page biography published in 1983 – had served on the advisory committee of the Artists International Association throughout the Second World War.

It’s a telling omission, which speaks volumes about how this groundbreaking artistic group has been persistently underrepresented by the art history establishment. Founded in October 1933 in a dingy studio in Covent Garden, the AIA emerged from a small group of impoverished, Soviet-curious young artists and designers. Galvanised by the austerity policies of the National Government, and alarmed by the rise of fascism, they sought to create opportunities for politically engaged, left-leaning creatives. Founding members, including James Boswell and James and Margaret Fitton, quickly attracted a wider circle, as conflict spread across Europe – from the Spanish Civil War to the wider catastrophe of the Second World War.

Membership and support soon extended to major figures of British Modernism. Through annual exhibitions – often staged in unconventional venues, such as the bombed-out site of John Lewis in Oxford Street – the AIA showcased artists such as Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Laura Knight, László Moholy-Nagy, Peggy Angus, Duncan Grant, and Bell herself. To explain the group’s marginalisation, Friend points to ‘an apolitical bias’ in art history, ‘shaped by a cultural climate in which art is increasingly treated as an asset class, and where competitive individualism – and the banal pursuit of celebrity – goes largely unquestioned’. At this moment of heightened geopolitical tension, Comrades in Art thus prompts a broader question: what role should political conviction and collective action play in contemporary artistic practice? The book accompanies the eponymous exhibition at Towner Eastbourne this summer (see ROSA Magazine Issue 17 Summer 2026 pg 17)

The Pin Jar (Rough Trade Books), Field magazine editor Sam Reid’s first novel, takes you on a spine-tingling pub-crawl in the 1970s Weald, following its fictitious narrator as he happens upon, and tape-records, curious locals relating harrowing folk tales in the local dialect. At the George Inn, in Alfriston, he hears of the Takener, a child-gobbling demon unleashed from the past by the locals’ greedy felling of a wood their forebears had planted centuries before, to protect the community from his bloodlust. At the Ram Inn, in Firle, he witnesses the account of a 20th-century witch taking her revenge on a drunken, lecherous youth. At the Burning Sky, in Glynde (presumably the Trevor), he listens to a haggard wandering songstress relating a rural hit-man’s ghoulish comeuppance. The tales are told in blank verse, with footnotes explaining some, though not all, of the old Sussex terms – your inner ear soon becomes accustomed to the cadence of the Wealden tongue, peppered with delicious local archaisms (and inventions): clishes, skreels, ellers and wims. It’s a read-in-an-hour affair, but don’t be put off by that: these powerful stories, and the narrator’s tale they’re wrapped in, will stay with you for a long time after you select an easy-to-find-again place for it on the bookshelf. Next, perhaps, to Robert Graves’ short stories. Finally a mention for Riffler & Pool Press, who have updated their charming fold-out Sussex Coast & Countryside Map & Guide, in two sections, one taking you from Hastings to Eastbourne, the other from Eastbourne to Brighton. It’s designed for culture-hungry cyclists and hikers, with pithy fact-filled box-outs, written by Robert McGowan, giving you the low-down on trails and stop-off points. The maps are illustrated by Benjamin Phillips, winner of the V&A Illustrator of the Year Award 2024.