There isn’t a lot of history in Eve Livingston’s book – “The British labour movement: A potted history” pages 10-15 – but what there is is sharp and perceptive. “The days of unionised and secure jobs in manufacturing and industry, and a time when class was widely recognised as an organising principle for society, have long made way for precarious and exploitative work and an active attempt to obscure and the experience and effects of class difference.” But while acknowledging the impact of […]
Book Review: Dazza Scott, Sabotage: The Story of the Hunt Saboteurs Association (Hunt Saboteurs Association, 2021). In 2023 the Hunt Saboteurs Association will mark its 60th anniversary. Sabotage shows that it has plenty to celebrate. For all the horrors, joys, tears, and moments of farce brought to life in this book, the hold of bloodsports is much diminished since the organisation was founded in 1963. There is a long tradition of opposition to fox hunting and other cruel sports, an expression […]
Raymond Williams’s novel, The Fight for Manod was first published in 1979. As we know, 1979 was an important year, seemingly a watershed year. In this year Margaret Thatcher was elected, and Ronald Regan launched what was to be his successful presidential campaign. Yet the social forces that pushed them into prominence and the form of capitalism on stilts now commonly known as Neoliberalism didn’t of course suddenly emerge overnight from nowhere. Like deadly toadstools, the mycelium that brought […]
This ‘supremely singable’ collection of 120 songs with musical settings should ‘enlighten and enliven our discussions and our singing in equal measure’ (Oskar Cox Jensen, Historian, UEA) At the heart of ‘Again with One Voice’ are the words and melodies of a remarkable collection of one hundred and twenty British songs from the turbulent hundred years that culminated with the Second Reform Act of 1868. The collection charts a century of working-class struggle for democracy and political reform […]
…the fences that divide England are not just symbols of the partition of people but the very cause of it. Bristol Radical History Group subscribers will find inspiration in Nick Hayes’s book. He sets out to trespass on a range of properties and rivers throughout England, defiantly ignoring the fact that he – and we - are excluded from 92% of the land in England and 97% of its waterways. In the course of his walk descriptions, Nick Hayes reveals some surprising historical heroes – […]
If the reader has had a public school education then this book is probably ‘a huge enjoyable read’ as recommended by one reviewer, on the other hand if the reader is a member of the majority of the British population who have not had the same educational advantage of the public school, then they are more likely to agree with the reviewer who labelled this book as ‘an enraged polemic’, and to empathise totally with the author. The history of public schools is described from the fourteenth century […]
This is an eloquent and angry account of Professor Hazel Carby’s family history linked to the shameful history of the British Empire. She is painfully honest about the relationship of her own parents - her mother born in Wales, her father from Jamaica, their marriage soured by “the climate of virulent and violent British racism.” It was in Bristol where her mother had grown up and where “ambition took root and flourished, the city that nurtured and nourished her dreaming…the city’s architecture […]
On Brandon Hill
This is an absolutely epic overview of Bristol culture – literary connections, film, music, gossip and much more since WW2. That’s around seven decades’ worth. You need to read it on an electronic device for two reasons: first, it’s an e-book; second, you will find yourself checking search engines, wikis, and music sites on every other page. In the words of the author, Nick Gilbert: "On Brandon Hill is the first ever comprehensive history of post-war Bristolian culture, and covers all the major […]
Anyone interested in the history of Australia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would do well to read Robert Hughes’s book. He describes in detail the development of the convict system and the colonisation of Australia from the first convict ship arriving at Sydney Cove in 1787 to the last convict voyage to Fremantle in 1868. With intensive research he has given the convicts a voice describing their own experiences of suffering, survival and resistance during that period. Robert […]
As you will have probably gathered from the title, Professor Gerald Horne wastes no time with mincing his words. The first paragraph of the Introduction is likewise refreshingly uncompromising about the position that the book takes: The years between 1603 and 1714 were perhaps the most decisive in English history. At the onset of the seventeenth century, the sceptered isle was a second-class power but the Great Britain that emerged at the beginning of the eighteenth century was, in many ways, […]
