Christopher Frayling

On Craftsmanship: towards a new Bauhaus

Christopher Frayling

Craftsmanship has again become fashionable in high places, just as it did in the last few recessions.The concept of craftsmanship has never been as relevant and timely as it is today. Assailed on all sides by – among many other tendencies – flexible working, short-termism, portfolio careers, quick-fix training and the cult of celebrity, it has recently re-entered public debate with a new sense of urgency. Why? This series of linked essays by the man who ran the Royal College of Art for many years explores the crafts in education, in history and literature, in the contemporary arts landscape, in the language, in the digital age, and takes an unsentimental, hard-headed look at craftsmanship today. Only when the romantic cobwebs have been blown away, it argues, can the key importance of the crafts be fully understood.

Inside the Bloody Chamber

Christopher Frayling

I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about people having battles with DHSS. But I haven't … I'm an arty person. Okay, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So what… Alienated is the only way to be, after all. Since 1990, Angela Carter’s reputation, as writer and thinker, has soared, to the point where her collection of folk and fairy tales for the modern age, The Bloody Chamber , is now a GCSE set text in England, and is taught on most university-level literature courses. There are MA programmes entirely devoted to her writings. Her complete works have been printed and reprinted over the last quarter-century, and films, The Company of Wolves , The Magic Toyshop ; and plays, such as Nights at the Circus (Kneehigh), have been derived from them. Her influence on ‘the contemporary Gothic’ is both wide-ranging and profound.