Gathering Stuart Hall's writing on art, photography and film, this collection is framed by Tawadros as the record of a deliberate detour: Hall's move away from the apparent solidity of politics and economics into culture and the visual, from which he returned with sharper accounts of power. Culture, in his phrase, was the domain of indirection.

The introduction traces how race gave Hall his angle. The 1970s Birmingham research that became Policing the Crisis let him see that Thatcherism was less an electoral victory than a change of historical conjuncture. By the late 1980s he was arguing that blackness is a constructed political and cultural category with no guarantee in nature, and that regimes of representation had to be interrogated rather than simply inverted.

The book follows Hall into institution-building, at Autograph and iniva and eventually Rivington Place, and into long friendships with artists, Isaac Julien above all.