Reinventing Sustainability: how archaeology can save the planet. By Erika Guttmann-Bond. 240mm. Pp x + 181, 58 col ills, others b/w. Oxbow Books, Oxford and Philadelphia, 2019. isbn 9781785709920. £29.95 (pbk).

Abstract

commercial savoir-faire. The matter of May’s socialism is covered in a chapter by Anna Mason; as an agitator she was earnest but no firebrand, and, despite her conspicuous good looks in youth, had no wish to become a poster-girl for the movement. There are some interesting anecdotes included, such as her encounter with a customs inspector on her arrival in New York to ‘spread the gospel of utilitarianism in art’: to her surprise, he is an admirer of her father and quotes one of his poems. May’s negotiations with the Victoria and Albert Museum over the publicity photographs for the Morris Centenary Exhibition in  suggest at best a single-minded and controlling nature and at worst an Electra complex. As an account of May Morris’s activities and interests this book scores highly. It is beautifully illustrated with very well-reproduced plates and will be a valuable resource for researchers and Morris devotees keen to piece together the disparate roles that May adopted. The major relationships in her fascinating, eclectic life are outlined in black and white, but none is coloured by any depth of analysis. It is intriguing to learn that, on May’s marriage to Henry Sparling, her socialist colleagues gave her a set of Walter Scott’s novels with a bookplate designed by Walter Crane. Did May, who declared forthrightly during her lecture tour of the United States that ‘the costume of today is neither picturesque nor clever’, warm to those opulent descriptions of medieval dress and tapestry that grace the pages of such a book as Ivanhoe?