Abstract

This is a book about the history of the Arts Council, and an assessment of regional theatre in Britain. Its subject is that much-visited battleground where funding bodies and artists meet to nervously eye each other up and tenatively shake hands, or go to full-on war. One might expect such a book to be a passionately partisan account of hidden agendas buried deep within a deliberately perplexing bureaucracy, or (depending on your political persuasion), a crusade against the promotion of a politically correct inclusivity that sacrifices artistic quality at great expense to the taxpayer. However, Turnbull’s book demonstrates admirable scholarly detachent and rigour on every page, where the temptation to grind a polemical axe might have been impossible for many writers to resist.