Shirkers, Skulkers, Deserters and the 'Live and Let Live' Principle: Everyday Resistance to Combat on the Western Front in World War 1 With Roger Ball Fraternisation between opposing armed forces on the Western front on Christmas Day 1914 is part of the British collective memory; sold to us a momentary 'miracle' involving a few hundred troops. Of far more interest is the massive scale and crucially the context for these events. The everyday 'hidden' resistance of troops on both sides to the […]
Anandi Ramamurthy will discuss the prejudice and political struggles which Asian youth movements have encountered in Britain. Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movement (Pluto Press, 2013) documents the vibrant Asian youth movements in 1970s and 80s Britain who struggled against the racism of the street and the state. Anandi Ramamurthy shows how they drew inspiration from Black Power movements, as well as anti-imperialist and workers' struggles across the globe. Drawing on her intimate knowledge […]
Steve Hunt will launch his book about Street Farm, published by Tangent Books in April 2014 Street Farm were an anarchist collective that worked to green the counterculture during the 1970s. Peter Crump, Bruce Haggart, Graham Caine and their friends put together Street Farmer, an underground paper that, alongside mutating tower blocks, cosmic tractors and sprouting one-way signs, propagated ideas for the radical transformation of urban living which they called ‘revolutionary urbanism’. Taking […]
The Fair Fight is a pulsating historical novel set within the world of female pugilists and their patrons in late eighteenth-century Bristol. It is an unputdownable story which takes you from a filthy brothel to the finest houses in the town, from the world of street fighters to the world of champions. Alive with the smells and sounds of the streets, The Fair Fight is a major debut. Anna Freeman a lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University as well as a multiple slam-winning performance […]
It’s 40 years since Wally Hope started the Peoples' Free Festivals at Stonehenge and 30 years since the last one. Wally Dean will tell the tales of The Wallies and the Peace Convoy. He will take us from Wally's utopian vision, his incarceration, and his suspicious demise, to the heyday of the anarchic free festival movement and its oppression at the hands of Thatcher’s Tory Party and the continuing struggle to free Stonehenge today. Wally Hope was the catalyst that spawned Crass and the […]
As part of this years Bristol Anarchist Bookfair, Bristol Radical History Group will again be running the Radical History Zone at Hydra Books. All the talks are at Hydra Books, 34 Old Market, BS2 0EZ. Radical History Zone Flyer Bookfair Posters
LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net for free. All our audio is in the public domain, so you may use it for whatever purpose you wish. We get most of our texts from Project Gutenberg, and the Internet Archive hosts our audio files (for free!). In the catalogue check out Non-Fiction > History and Non-fiction > Philosophy in the Genre/Subject index.
Introduction The last few years I have been playing word association games; asking people at work and at the pub to say the first thing that comes into their head about a particular historical event or figure. So typically the English Civil War carries mental images of 'laughing cavaliers', 'miserable roundheads' and blood-thirsty executions of kings, World War I produces 'mud, blood and barbed wire' and recently, PC Blakelock elicits 'brutal mob violence'. Of course some people and events […]
Saturday 26th April, Bristol Anarchist Bookfair @ Trinity Centre Bristol Anarchist Bookfair Collective invites all Bristolians and others living in the South West to the 2013 Bookfair. Find out everything you ever wanted to know about anarchism but didn’t know where or who to ask. The Bookfair sees most of the diverse strands of Bristol’s growing anarchist and radical movements gather together, along with many of the UK’s major anarchist publishers and distributors. Alongside an enormous range […]
Are all the events in the great world… so different from what the historians say? Although it’s a contradiction in terms, it seems accurate to say that John Cowper Powys is a novelist who has more than a single magnum opus, maybe even several. For me The Glastonbury Romance is his great work among the Wessex novels but it is difficult to think of Wolf Solent, Maiden Castle or Weymouth Sands as in any way lesser works. The vast and panoramic Owen Glendower looks and reads like his magnum opus […]
