Sybil & Cyril: Cutting Through Time

From Jenny Uglow, one of our most admired writers, a beautifully illustrated story of a love affair and a dynamic artistic partnership between the wars.

In 1922, Cyril Power, a fifty-year-old architect, left his family to work with the twenty-four-year-old Sybil Andrews. They would be together for twenty years. Both became famous for their dynamic, modernist linocuts--streamlined, full of movement and brilliant color, summing up the hectic interwar years. Yet at the same time, they looked back to medieval myths and early music, to country ways that were disappearing from sight.

Jenny Uglow’s Sybil & Cyril: Cutting Through Time traces their struggles and triumphs, conflicts and dreams, following them from Suffolk to London, from the New Forest to Vancouver Island. This is a world of futurists, surrealists, and pioneering abstraction, but also of the buzz of the new, of machines and speed, of shops and sport and dance, shining against the threat of depression and looming shadows of war.

Jenny Uglow is the author of many prizewinning biographies and cultural histories, including The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future and In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815. Her interest in text and image is explored in biographies of William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and Walter Crane, and in Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense, winner of the 2018 Hawthornden Prize. She was the chair of the Royal Society of Literature from 2014 to 2016. She lives in Canterbury and Cumbria.