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Poetry Books & Culture- A Valentine Poem
Updated: 13 Feb 2012
I love thee - I love thee,
'Tis all that I can say
It is my vision in the night,
My dreaming in the day.
- Thomas Hood |
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Poetry Books & Culture- A Valentine Poem
Updated: 11 Feb 2012
Love is no respecter of age or practicality
Neither morality: unabashed
She enters where she will
Unheeding that her immortal fires
Burn up human hearts...
- Phillip Pulfrey, from Beyond Me |
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Poetry Books & Culture- A Valentine Poem
Updated: 10 Feb 2012
Must, bid the Morn awake!
Sad Winter now declines,
Each bird doth choose a mate;
This day's Saint Valentine's.
For that good bishop's sake
Get up and let us see
What beauty it shall be
That Fortune us assigns.
- Michael Drayton |
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Poetry Books & Culture- A Valentine Poem
Updated: 09 Feb 2012
A bell is no bell 'til you ring it,
A song is no song 'til you sing it,
And love in your heart
Wasn't put there to stay -
Love isn't love
'Til you give it away.
- Oscar Hammerstein, Sound of Music, You Are Sixteen (Reprise) |
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Poetry Books & Culture-A Valentine Poem
Updated: 08 Feb 2012
You've given me a reason
For smiling once again,
You've filled my life with peaceful dreams
and you've become my closest friend.
You've shared your heartfelt secrets
And your trust you've given me,
You showed me how to feel again
To laugh, and love, and see.
If life should end tomorrow
And from this world I should part,
I shall be forever young
For you have touched my heart
Valentines is near
Just wishing you were here
My debt to you, Belovèd,
Is one I cannot pay
In any coin of any realm
On any reckoning day.
- Jessie B. Rittenhouse |
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Poetry Books & Culture-A Valentine Poem
Updated: 07 Feb 2012
Shall we compare our hearts to a garden -
with beautiful blooms, straggling weeds,
swooping birds and sunshine, rain -
and most importantly, seeds.
- Grey Livingston |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Valentine Poem -One Perfect Rose
Updated: 06 Feb 2012
One Perfect Rose
A single flow'r he sent me, since we met,
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted pure, with scented dew still wet - -
One perfect rose.
I know the language of the floweret.
My fragile leaves, it said, his heart enclose.
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.
Why is it no one ever sent yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.
- Dorothy Parker |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Valentine - Drink to me only, with thine eyes
Updated: 04 Feb 2012
To Celia
Drink to me, only, with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kisse but in the cup,
And Ile not look for wine.
The thirst, that from the soule doth rise,
Doth aske a drink divine:
But might I of Jove's Nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee, late, a rosie wreath,
Not so much honoring thee,
As giving it a hope, that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon did'st onely breathe,
And sent'st it back to mee:
Since when it growes, and smells, I sweare,
Not of it selfe, but thee.
- Robert Burns: The Poetry (1896) |
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Poetry Books & Culture- "If Spirit Alone Won Battles"-the diary of a striking miner
Updated: 03 Feb 2012
A tale worth reading
Thursday 02 February 2012
I have just read If Spirit Alone Won Battles, (price £10) the diary of striking miner John Lowe by his grandson Jonathan Symcox.
An excellent foreword by Dennis Skinner sets the scene for a day-to-day account of the strike from John's diaries.
Did this struggle really take place in England's green and pleasant land?
The book gives a graphic account of the highs and lows experienced by the striking miners and how they carried on their fight in spite of the overwhelming odds against them.
It is a must-read for all.
Jack Richardson
Northampton
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Poetry Books & Culture- Love Sonnet 18
Updated: 03 Feb 2012
Love Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
- William Shakespeare |
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Poetry Books & Culture-Valentine Sayings
Updated: 02 Feb 2012
Many are the starrs I see,
but in my eye no starr like thee.
English saying
- We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.
Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.
- William Shakespeare
Anyone can catch your eye, but it takes someone special to catch your heart.
Grow old with me! The best is yet to be.
- Robert Browning |
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Poetry, Books & Culture - Valentine
Updated: 01 Feb 2012
Valentine
Wendy Cope 1945-
My heart has made its mind up
And I’m afraid it’s you.
Whatever you’ve got lined up,
My heart has made up it’s mind
And if you can’t be signed up
This year, next year will do
My heart has made it’s mind up
And I’m afraid it’s you |
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Poetry,Books & Culture- A word to husbands /wives
Updated: 15 Jan 2012
A word to husbands
To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up
Ogden Nash (1901 - 71)
A word to wives
To keep your marriage alive
And your husband home at night
Be sure to let him stay on top
And always…. think he’s right
Or (………….. tucked in and tight?)
The Radical ( 1943- ) |
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Poetry Books & Culture- The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear
Updated: 14 Jan 2012
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat:
They took some honey,
and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!"
Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl,
How charmingly sweet you sing!
Oh! let us be married;
too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?"
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the bong-tree grows;
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood,
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.
"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?" Said the Piggy, "I will."
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand on the edge of the sand
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon. |
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Poetry Books & Culture-The Existentialist's Guide to Death,The Universe and Nothingness -by Gary Cox
Updated: 14 Jan 2012
The Existentialist's Guide To Death, The Universe And Nothingness
by Gary Cox (Continuum £14.99)
Tuesday 10 January 2012
by Alex Miller
Douglas Adams's famous Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy aspired to be a guide to "life, the universe and everything." In this book Gary Cox gives the existentialist version - a guide to death, the universe and nothingness.
Why this focus on death and nothingness?
The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus once wrote: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."
The answer given by the existentialists is that life is very much worth living.
But whatever worth and meaning it has is a result of our own free choices about how to live our lives.
Such choices are made in the full knowledge that we are essentially finite creatures.
We are doomed to annihilation in a universe that is itself intrinsically meaningless.
For Sartre, the most famous existentialist of them all, freedom is essentially bound up with consciousness and consciousness is being-for-itself, a nothingness that must be sharply distinguished from being-in-itself.
Cox does a good job of explaining these abstruse ideas in language accessible to non-philosophers.
He intersperses his exposition of thinkers such as Heidegger, Sartre and Kierkegaard with illustrations from the likes of Sister Sledge, The Doors and Woody Allen.
In so doing he relates the abstract concepts of existentialist phenomenology - anxiety, authenticity, bad faith and facticity - to questions about childhood, marriage, sexual desire, God and death.
One minor criticism is that no space at all is given to the idea of political engagement.
Sartre, for example, was a committed Marxist, and politically active for much of his adult life.
This was not just an incidental biographical fact. It was closely bound up with his philosophical outlook.
After all, Marxism and phenomenology share a common root in the philosophy of Hegel.
Overall, though, Cox has produced a fine book that can be highly recommended.
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Poetry, Books & Culture - Disabled
Updated: 13 Jan 2012
Disabled
by the Radical
I don’t like being disabled
Because of my dodgy knee
And if it wasn’t for my Blue permit
I couldn’t make it for a pee
I’m restricted where I go
And where I can park my car
And if it wasn’t for my Blue Permit
I wouldn’t go so far
I don’t like being disabled
It’s all to do with work
But even though I am retired
I don't see it as a perk
I don’t like being disabled
Or staying at home to mope
My Blue permit gets me out
It gives me so much hope
I don’t like being disabled
Though the Council give so little care
And if it wasn’t for my Blue permit
From here I couldn’t get to there |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Anthem for Doomed Youth - Father C Cameron to take to troops in Afganistan ?
Updated: 21 Dec 2011
Anthem For Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds. |
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Poetry,Books & Culture- "Is there for honest poverty...Shall brothers be for all that"
Updated: 20 Dec 2011
Is there for honest poverty
That hangs his head, and all that?
The coward slave, we pass him by -
We dare be poor for all that!
For all that, and all that,
Our toils obscure, and all that,
The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The man's the gold for all that.
What though on homely fare we dine,
Wear course grey woolen, and all that?
Give fools their silks, and knaves their wine -
A man is a man for all that.
For all that, and all that,
Their tinsel show, and all that,
The honest man, though ever so poor,
Is king of men for all that.
You see yonder fellow called 'a lord,'
Who struts, and stares, and all that?
Though hundreds worship at his word,
He is but a dolt for all that.
For all that, and all that,
His ribboned, star, and all that,
The man of independent mind,
He looks and laughs at all that.
A prince can make a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, and all that!
But an honest man is above his might -
Good faith, he must not fault that
For all that, and all that,
Their dignities, and all that,
The pith of sense and pride of worth
Are higher rank than all that.
Then let us pray that come it may
(As come it will for a' that)
That Sense and Worth over all the earth
Shall have the first place and all that!
For all that, and all that,
It is coming yet for all that,
That man to man the world over
Shall brothers be for all that.
by Robert Burns |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Hope
Updated: 18 Dec 2011
Hope
Folk like me think
Is there hope?
When folk like me
Are scared to vote
by Benjamin Zephaniah |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Family Values
Updated: 18 Dec 2011
Family Values
Reds are in yu beds
Banks are in de red
Bombs in de city
Taxes burn
Crime rates soar
Hospitals fight
Schools rebel
Water kills
Cops kill
Cover up’s uncovered
Neo – Nazis rise
Pension funds not trusted
Talks fail
War looms
An yu hav de cheek to call me
A
Problem
Child
by Benjamin Zephaniah |
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Poetry Books & Culture- O! 'tis my delight on a Friday night
Updated: 18 Dec 2011
O! ‘tis my delight on a Friday night
When sprats they isn’t dear
To fry a couple of score or so
Upon a fire clear
They eats so well, they bears the bell
From all the fish I knows:
Then let us eat them while we can
Before the price is rose
The Lincolnshire Poacher
When I was bound apprentice in famous Lincolnshire
Full well I served my master for more than seven years
Till I took up to poaching, as you shall quickly hear
Oh, ’tis my delight on a shiny night in the season of the year.
As me and my companions were setting of a snare
’Twas then we spied the gamekeeper, for him we dld not care
Far we can wrestle and fight, my boys and jump out anywhere
Oh, ’tis my delight on a shiny night in the season of the year.
As me and my companions were setting four or five
And taking on ’em up again, we caught a hare alive
We took a hare alive my boys, and through the woods did steer
Oh, ’tis my delight on a shiny night in the season of the year.
I threw him on my shoulder and then we trudged home
We took him to a neighbour’s house, and sold him for a crown
We sold him for a crown, my boys, but I did not tell you where
Oh, ’tis my delight on a shiny night in the season of the year.
Success to ev’ry gentleman that lives in Lincolnshire
Success to every poacher that wants to sell a hare
Bad luck to ev’ry gamekeeper that will not sell his deer
Oh, ’tis my delight on a shiny night in the season of the year. |
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Poetry Books & Culture-Visit -www.peopleinhistory.co.uk
Updated: 18 Dec 2011
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time,for history is a pattern
of timeless moments.
So, while the light falls
on a winter's afternoon,in a secluded chapel
History is now and England
TS Eliot
Quarters 1943
Visit A People's History of England on www.peopleinhistory.co.uk |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Caring for a Cranky old Man ?
Updated: 23 Nov 2011
Cranky Old Man
What do you see nurses? . . .. . .What do you see?
What are you thinking .. . when you're looking at me?
A cranky old man, . . . . . .not very wise,
Uncertain of habit .. . . . . . . .. with faraway eyes?
Who dribbles his food .. . .. . . and makes no reply.
When you say in a loud voice . .'I do wish you'd try!'
Who seems not to notice . . .the things that you do.
And forever is losing . . . . . .. . . A sock or shoe?
Who, resisting or not . . . .. lets you do as you will,
With bathing and feeding . . . .The long day to fill?
Is that what you're thinking?. .Is that what you see?
Then open your eyes, nurse .you're not looking at me.
I'll tell you who I am . . . . . As I sit here so still,
As I do at your bidding, .. . . . as I eat at your will.
I'm a small child of Ten . .with a father and mother,
Brothers and sisters .. . . .. . who love one another
A young boy of Sixteen . . . . with wings on his feet
Dreaming that soon now . . .. . . a lover he'll meet.
A groom soon at Twenty . . . ..my heart gives a leap.
Remembering, the vows .. . .that I promised to keep.
At Twenty-Five, now . . . . .I have young of my own.
Who need me to guide . . . And a secure happy home.
A man of Thirty . . . . . . My young now grown fast,
Bound to each other . . .. With ties that should last.
At Forty, my young sons .. .have grown and are gone,
But my woman is beside me . . to see I don't mourn.
At Fifty, once more, .. ..Babies play 'round my knee,
Again, we know children . . . . My loved one and me.
Dark days are upon me . . . . My wife is now dead.
I look at the future ... . . . . I shudder with dread.
For my young are all rearing . . . young of their own.
And I think of the years . . . And the love that I've known.
I'm now an old man . . . . . . .. and nature is cruel.
It's jest to make old age . . . . . . . look like a fool.
The body, it crumbles .. . . grace and vigour, depart.
There is now a stone . .. . where I once had a heart.
But inside this old carcass . A young man still dwells,
And now and again . . . . . my battered heart swells
I remember the joys . . . . . . I remember the pain.
And I'm loving and living . . . . . . . life over again.
I think of the years, all too few . . .. gone too fast.
And accept the stark fact . . . that nothing can last.
So open your eyes, people . . . . . . . open and see.
Not a cranky old man .
Look closer . . . . see . .. . . .... . ME!!
Remember this poem when you next meet an older person who you might brush aside without looking at the young soul within ... . . .
we will all, one day, be there, too!
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Poetry, Books & Culture- DUEL AND DUETS-Why Men & Women Talk so differently by John L. Locke
Updated: 17 Nov 2011
Duels And Duets - Why Men And Women Talk So Differently
by John L Locke (CUP, £14.99)
Wednesday 16 November 2011
by Justin Dowling
There is a nice little pearl at the start of Duels And Duets that deals with imaginary ornithologists wondering why "some birds" have complex and attractive songs and "other birds" do not.
The author asserts that without reference to the sex of the birds they will never be able to fully understand the function of bird song.
Locke addresses this point further by pointing out the degree of biophobia - humanity's distaste for natural systems - that exists when studying human behaviour.
Duels and Duets is centred around studying the biological differences between the apparent divergences that have evolved in male and female speech patterns.
These are differences that, post-feminism, people are often reluctant to explore.
Locke competently investigates the idea that men are often verbally combative with one another, however much "in jest," and that women are often seen to be co-operative and supporting and the providers of sympathy-building relationships.
Using examples from the animal kingdom, anthropological studies and historical reference, Locke suggests that women and men employ specific communicative behaviours that they use among themselves and that these languages are rooted in mating strategy.
Locke argues that these vastly complicated and different methods of communication may have juxtaposed and given birth to spoken language itself.
The book is fascinating, but it does wade into the middle of a highly charged political debate regarding gender politics.
It's a sad fact that most people rarely change their mind on emotive issues but if you feel like digging deeper into the science you will certainly enjoy this book and may even learn something.
It's certainly intellectually leaps and bounds beyond Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, yet it's still an accessible read.
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Poetry,Books & Culture- "YOU CAN'T SAY THAT" by Ken Livingstone
Updated: 17 Nov 2011
You Can't Say That
by Ken Livingstone (Faber and Faber, £25)
Wednesday 16 November 2011
by John Green
As an autobiography this is a fascinating and informative portrayal of London and British politics during the latter half of the 20th and into the 21st century.
It is also leavened by Ken Livingstone's sharp wit and lack of deference.
A rarity among Labour politicians, he has stayed true to his socialist convictions for all his political life.
His leadership of first the Greater London Council, before Thatcher abolished it, then later as London's mayor gave us the nearest thing to a genuinely socialist-led city council we've had.
Born in south London to a working-class family, he never lost his loyalty to working people, and was determined to make London a more just and egalitarian capital city.
He wasn't able to fully achieve his goal, not only because he was demonised and caricatured as "Red Ken" by his enemies, but because he was also sniped at and stabbed in the back by his "party comrades."
He did, however, achieve a considerable amount during his years of leadership.
He continually raised vital issues, was not frightened by controversy and battled relentlessly and with astute brilliance for his ideals.
Although Livingstone rightly clings to traditional socialist principles, he has been able to adapt to the changes demanded by the ravenous media and to maintain his "man of the people" reputation.
He is very much a maverick who refuses to toe any party line if he fundamentally disagrees.
And it was largely because he was someone who clearly stood apart from the mass of mainstream oleaginous and opportunist party politicians that he won wide admiration and respect.
Ironically, he probably lost the the election in 2008 against Boris Johnson precisely because he decided to stand as the official Labour Party candidate and Johnson was able to don his mantle as the maverick politician even though he is a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, albeit with a rather endearingly bumbling and unintentionally comedic talent.
Probably the one serious weaknesses of Ken's mayoralty was that he surrounded himself with a too-narrow cabal of people he felt he could trust politically.
This, unwittingly, gave much needed and unnecessary ammunition to his enemies.
Although the Morning Star and London communists gave him extensive, if critical, support over the years they hardly merit a mention here and then only in a rather dismissive way.
Whether Livingstone should have bowed out gracefully after his last defeat instead of deciding to fight for the mayoralty once again is a moot point.
But there is no-one at present more capable of taking up the baton, no-one who has his experience or principled track record.
That's why he merits our continued support.
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Poetry, Books & Culture-Seeing the Wood for the Trees by Mike Ward
Updated: 14 Nov 2011
Seeing the woods for the trees
By Mike Ward
Lets keep our forests fresh and green
Where with the birds we are free to roam
Where deer and squirrel make their home
Where children play and climb the trees
Where we exercise pets in pine scented breeze
Where under sun dappled canopy
We roam and ramble at our ease
Where solitude and peace are nature’s pleasure
We will fight and keep the nation’s treasure
We will bar the way to ideological measure
We will never accept defeat
We will fight in the forest
We will fight in the street |
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Poetry,Books & Culture- Speak by Faiz Ahmed
Updated: 14 Nov 2011
Speak
By Faiz Ahmed
Speak, your lips are free.
Speak,it is your own tongue.
Speak, it is your own body.
Speak,your life is still yours.
See how in the blacksmith’s shop
The flames burn wild,the iron glows red;
The locks open their jaws,
And every chain begins to break.
Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue;
Speak, ‘cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, Speak, whatever you must speak |
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Poetry,Books & Culture- Shakespeare's Macbeth-A dark Cave.A Cauldron boiling.Thunder
Updated: 02 Nov 2011
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
from Macbeth
A dark Cave. In the middle, a Caldron boiling. Thunder.
Enter the three Witches.
1 WITCH. Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd.
2 WITCH. Thrice and once, the hedge-pig whin'd.
3 WITCH. Harpier cries:—'tis time! 'tis time!
1 WITCH. Round about the caldron go;
In the poison'd entrails throw.—
Toad, that under cold stone,
Days and nights has thirty-one;
Swelter'd venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i' the charmed pot!
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
2 WITCH. Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,—
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
3 WITCH. Scale of dragon; tooth of wolf;
Witches' mummy; maw and gulf
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark;
Root of hemlock digg'd i the dark;
Liver of blaspheming Jew;
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver'd in the moon's eclipse;
Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,—
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
For the ingrediants of our caldron.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
2 WITCH. Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.
brinded - having obscure dark streaks or flecks on gray gulf - the throat drab - prostitute chaudron - entrails
The above appears at the beginning of Act IV, Scene 1 as found in:
Shakespeare, William. The Globe Illustrated Shakespeare:
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Poetry Books & Culture-Goodbye Barcelona- A Passionate New Musical
Updated: 18 Oct 2011
Goodbye Barcelona – A passionate new musical
www.goodbyebarcelona.com
In 1936, as fascism sweeps across Europe, one country reaches out in its hour of need… and tens of thousands of ordinary people make an extraordinary decision to help. Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters… more than 42,000 travel to Spain from all over the world, risking their lives for the freedom of others.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War, and inspired by first hand accounts, Goodbye Barcelona focuses on Sammy, a young man driven to leave his home in London and join the International Brigades to fight against the fascists.
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Poetry,Books & Culture-Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt by Richard Gott
Updated: 18 Oct 2011
Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt
Magisterial history of the foundation of the British empire, and the forgotten story of resistance to its formation.
This revelatory new history punctures the widely held belief that the British Empire was an imaginative and civilizing enterprise.
Instead, Britain’s Empire reveals a history of systemic repression and almost perpetual violence, showing how British rule was imposed as a military operation and maintained as a military dictatorship.
For colonized peoples, the experience was a horrific one, of slavery, famine, battle and extermination.
Yet, as Richard Gott shows, the Empire’s oppressed peoples did not go quietly into this good night. Wherever Britain tried to plant its flag, it met with opposition.
From Ireland to India, from the American colonies to Australia, Gott traces the rebellions and resistance of subject peoples whose all-but-forgotten stories are excluded from traditional accounts of empire.
He shows, too, how the British Empire provided a blueprint for the annihilation of peoples in twentieth-century Europe, and argues that its leaders must rank alongside the dictators of the twentieth century as authors of crimes against humanity on an infamous scale. |
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Poetry Books & Culture-The American Crucible-A survey of slavery, emancipation and human rights
Updated: 18 Oct 2011
The American Crucible by Robin Blackburn – review
A survey of slavery, emancipation and human rights
£20 or less...
Greg Grandin
guardian.co.uk,
A group of slaves outside their quarters on a Georgia plantation. Photograph: Corbis
It is tempting to see Robin Blackburn's The American Crucible as the capstone of an influential career.
As a founding editor of the New Left Review and Verso, leading activist in the London university protests of the late 1960s, and author of a number of important studies of New World slavery and global economics, Blackburn has long pondered many of the themes related to human freedom he explores here.
But this new book, monumental though it is, shouldn't be read as a culmination but rather a catching of breath, and a continuation of arguments initially made by the great original theorists of the Atlantic World system, Eric Williams, CLR James, and WEB Du Bois, who, writing in the early 20th century, were among the first to stress the importance of slavery in the creation of western culture and society.
- The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights
- by Robin Blackburn
Because it tied together so many threads of human interaction – transportation, communication, warfare, labour, finance, trade, consumption, manufacturing, agriculture, inter-imperial rivalry, territorial expansion – slavery is the last institution that historians can still call a "system" without feeling like relics from the 1970s.
Still, there are now few big books making the argument that slavery and its overthrow made the modern world.
The American Crucible – which covers half a millennia, all of the Americas, and a good deal of Europe and Africa – bucks this trend.
Along with Williams, a descendent of both slaves and slave traders who was elected the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Blackburn stresses slavery's role in underwriting the west's industrial expansion.
With James, also a descendent of slaves, Blackburn credits the importance of political struggle and ideas in rendering slavery morally indefensible.
And with Du Bois, likewise also descended from Caribbean slaves, Blackburn explores the psychic and ideological construction of white supremacy following slavery's formal end.
The centrepiece of The American Crucible is Blackburn's measured reconstruction of the chronology of the Haitian revolution and its influence on freedom movements in the United States, Spanish America and Brazil, a persuasive rebuttal of scholarly assessments that the revolution was exceptionally bloody or that its leaders instituted a new form of anti-European racism.
It wasn't and they didn't, certainly to no greater extent than that which occurred in other chapters in the age of revolution. But Blackburn does more than defend James's argument that Haitians universalised European ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality.
He extends it across all of the Americas: "Momentous clashes over slavery," Blackburn writes, generated new notions of "human freedom and human unity" that would inform modern social democracy and human rights.
The American Crucible likewise amasses substantial data to support Williams's famous but disputed thesis that slavery financed the industrial revolution.
Beyond direct profit from the trade itself, embryonic British industrialism was nurtured, Blackburn writes, through a range of supplementary economic activity, including manufacturing exports to Africa, revenue generated by plantations, the import of cheap and abundant raw material from those plantations, and the extension of credit that financed slavery.
Blackburn, though, rejects the notion associated with Williams and other economic determinists that slavery ended only because it had become a drag on capitalist profits.
Instead, leavened by James and Du Bois, as well as by more recent scholarship, he describes emancipation in all its vexed, indeterminate grandeur, propelled by violent clashes, public debate, harrowing exposés, and the consolidation of new notions of freedom and equality.
Karl Marx himself was keenly aware that capitalism could easily support, even thrive on, chattel slavery and other forms of human bondage – a point Blackburn underscores in his other new book, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (Verso, £12.99).
Marx's analysis of the causes of the civil war holds up well compared to the smug liberal London opinion of his day, whose organs, such as the Economist, were certain that the conflict was really about tariffs.
Marx knew, well before hostilities broke out, that the crisis was about slavery.
The "dirty dogs of the Confederacy" were inherently expansionist, he thought, and would spread not just west but into Mexico and the Caribbean if unchecked.
The north, for its part, "wages war" in a way expected of "a bourgeois republic, where fraud has so long reigned supreme", its fractiousness contained only by the resolve of the "singled-minded son of the working class," as Marx described Lincoln.
Far from advocating white-skin socialism, Marx in his copious writings on the American civil war and its aftermath – the most important of which are reproduced here, along with those of Lincoln and others – demonstrates universalism: the "rescue of an enchained race", Marx wrote to Lincoln, would lead to the "reconstruction of a social world".
Actual reconstruction, carried out half heartedly by Lincoln's successors, was something else entirely.
Slaves were unchained, the union saved, but, as Blackburn points out, no unified central government emerged that could check the repression launched against the executors of emancipation's full potential: free blacks in the south, agrarian radicals in the west, and a militant working class in the north.
In other words, the prerequisite for a mass-based labour party – a strong state that could regulate capital and contain the violence of its night riders and company goons – didn't exist, leading militants, including many German-Americans allied with Marx's International, to forsake electoral politics and pursue pure syndicalism.
What would have happened, Blackburn asks, had Marx – who in Europe supported both union and party building – relocated to New York or Chicago?
His answer is necessarily wistful: just as Marx "saw the importance of slavery at the start of the civil war, so he would surely have focused on 'winning the battle of democracy'" by urging his comrades towards a more flexible, potentially successful strategy to secure both political liberty and social equality, which Blackburn, like Marx, understands to be indivisible.
An Unfinished Revolution is an apt coda to The American Crucible – the latter a probing exploration of the moral world slavery and its abolition created, the former a meditation on a world that could have been.
Greg Grandin's Fordlandia is published by Icon
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Poetry Books & Culture-Autumn by Chris Brennan
Updated: 11 Oct 2011
AUTUMN
by Christopher Brennan
Autumn: the year breathes dully towards its death,
beside its dying sacrificial fire;
the dim world's middle-age of vain desire
is strangely troubled, waiting for the breath
that speaks the winter's welcome malison
to fix it in the unremembering sleep:
the silent woods brood o'er an anxious deep,
and in the faded sorrow of the sun,
I see my dreams' dead colours, one by one,
forth-conjur'd from their smouldering palaces,
fade slowly with the sigh of the passing year.
They wander not nor wring their hands nor weep,
discrown'd belated dreams! but in the drear
and lingering world we sit among the trees
and bow our heads as they, with frozen mouth,
looking, in ashen reverie, towards the clear
sad splendour of the winter of the far south. |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Karl Marx and World Literature by S S Prawer
Updated: 08 Oct 2011
Karl Marx And World Literature
by SS Prawer (Verso, £16.99)
Wednesday 05 October 2011
by John Green
Prawer makes clear from the outset of this absorbing and accessible investigation that he is not attempting to discuss Marx's theories of literary criticism but to illuminate the role literature played in Marx's life and the development of his thinking.
As recipients of a solid German secondary school education, both Marx and Engels gained a thorough grounding in the classical literature of Greece and Rome as well as Biblical Hebrew alongside the greats of the European enlightenment such as Voltaire, Shakespeare and Goethe.
While the future political ideas of both men would challenge some of the most determinedly held assumptions of Western establishments, they found much of their inspiration in the literary works of the past.
As a young student Marx was more interested in literature than history or philosophy. One of his earliest dreams was to become a writer and he toyed with the idea of publishing his poetry.
Even in his earliest literary efforts as a teenager one can find the germs of his later thinking. He identified closely with literary figures who were men of action, "world changers" like Prometheus and Odysseus.
In his own poems he expresses an overpowering drive to action, for "praxis," rejecting romantic contemplation.
A whole number of Marx's mature ideas appear to have found their nascence in key images from literature. Certainly the evocative and fiery language used in the Communist Manifesto testifies to Marx's eloquent command of language.
Much of his early writings are littered with preconfigurations of his later mature thinking.
In the poem Human Pride, written as a 19-year-old, he evokes the "alienation" and oppressiveness of a modern city.
Yet he emphasises that the city's buildings did not create themselves but were made by human ingenuity - human labour.
Even though strongly influenced by European Romantic writers, Marx very early on rejected the movement as a road to understanding society.
He sees writers, poets and painters as "producers" of works in the same way that craftsmen and women are, not in the first instance as a different species of humanity, "creative beings."
Marx recognised the dialectical connection between aesthetics and content.
It was often the case, as with Balzac and Dickens, that the authors themselves were not political militants but captured essential truths about the societies they wrote of.
He and Engels were among the first to recognise that literature and indeed all the arts were dialectically related and connected to the societies in which they were produced.
Marx considered literature as a means of establishing complex connections between humanity's economic and cultural activities.
He made clear that not only economic and social struggle matter, but demonstrated how artistic works can and do enrich our world.
But he never fell into the trap of praising those who held progressive ideas but were poor writers.
Many crude Marxists have attempted to establish direct causal links between works of art and the economic system.
Yet Marx always emphasised that the base-superstructure relationship between the arts and the economic system was not a mechanical one.
Works of art don't simply reflect the societies in which they were given birth but are refracted and may have only a tenuous link with the economic base.
Only in a communist society, Marx argued, will everyone be in a position to express themselves creatively.
As long as class society exists, the ruling classes will maintain their hegemony over creative labour.
Throughout, Prawer reveals a sensitive and highly perceptive approach to Marx's relationship with world literature and the way it helped shape his world view.
With a deep understanding and sympathy for Marx's political ideas and an exceptional knowledge of his work, he is able to make the relevant and appropriate connections so eloquently and convincingly demonstrated in this book
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Poetry,Books & Culture-The Marvellous Mrs Beeton, The Book of Cookery & Household Management
Updated: 08 Oct 2011
The Marvellous Mrs Beeton,
with Sophie Dahl, BBC Two, review
Kylie O'Brien reviews The Marvellous Mrs Beeton, with Sophie Dahl, on BBC Two.
9:05PM BST 29 Sep 2011
Could someone have a quiet word with Sophie Dahl?
Cheekbones like Sabatier knives and a smile wide as a Bath Oliver biscuit do not a great presenter make, and last night’s effort –
The Marvellous Mrs Beeton, with Sophie Dahl (BBC Two) – was damp as undercooked pastry.
It could be that a lot of charm goes a very little way, as last month’s request for £500,000 to save her grandpa Roald’s shed proves (what was the Today programme thinking?
That we’d all chip in a fiver to save a millionairess model, wife to multimillionaire musician Jamie Cullum, not to mention the Dahl estate, from coughing up, simply because Sophie asked us nicely?).
It didn’t wash.
Nor did The Marvellous Mrs Beeton, of whom Sophie, eyes tearing up with all the vacuousness of an X Factor contestant, declared herself “a devotee”.
She talked to various food experts, historians and even Jilly Cooper in her exploration of the life of the country’s most iconic cook (“I want to breathe the neighbourhood that Isabella Beeton first called home,” she said, bafflingly, pacing the streets of Pinner where Isabella and her husband Sam moved as newlyweds).
She also had a go at testing Mrs Beeton’s recipes.
A lot of gush and twaddle got in the way of a great story.
The Mrs Beeton we think we know – the perfect housewife and Victorian matron – was a fabrication. Isabella Beeton, born in 1836 in Cheapside, was in fact a canny hack.
She married Sam Beeton, a magazine publisher, in her early twenties, and – far from staying at home – commuted into town where she worked for him as a journalist and editor.
Mrs B compiled her great opus when she was only 23; it was an instant hit.
The Book of Household Management sold 60,000 copies in its first year, outselling Great Expectations, and was avidly read by the burgeoning middle-class wives and mothers desperate to learn how to cook, choose servants, budget and dress.
Yet only four years after its publication Isabella Beeton died, aged 28, having caught puerperal fever after the birth of her fourth child.
In her short life she had seen two of her children die, one aged three, the other three months; she suffered several miscarriages.
Sam, having gone bankrupt while Isabella was alive, died aged 47 – possibly from syphilis, which he passed to his wife.
What Sophie also wanted to know was whether Mrs Beeton’s advice is relevant today.
She was determined to find the answer ‘‘yes’’, despite the evidence.
Especially the cookery.
Mrs B’s famous recipes (which pioneered the listing of ingredients, followed by instructions and price) are largely rewritten for modern readers, and the original versions Sophie tested were comically awful: the linseed cold remedy was described as ‘‘prosthetic snot” by botanist James Wong; the gingerbread, said the Suffolk WI, “bizarre”; the pigeon pie, with birds’ feet sticking out of the pastry, Jurassic Park meets Alien.
If you want to find out more about Mrs Beeton, I can’t recommend highly enough Kathryn Hughes’s biography,
The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton, televised as a drama five years ago and bound to be repeated.
Memo to Sophie: watch and learn. |
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POETRY BOOKS & CULTURE- JOHN KOTZ -THE STORY OF A MUNICIPAL SOCIALIST
Updated: 19 Sep 2011
Vintage Red: The Story Of A Municipal Socialist
by John Kotz (Manifesto Press, £9.95)
Tuesday 13 September 2011
by Ivan Beavis
"If it is not recorded it is lost," Rodney Bickerstaffe aptly says in his foreword to this unassuming book about the life and political times of John Kotz.
He was the major political figure in the London borough of Hackney's Labour politics from the war right up until the ultra-left in the party foolishly voted him out of office during the 1980s.
Persuaded to move out to rural Essex by his family, he spent another eight years on Braintree council.
Nowadays private is good and public is bad as we grapple with yet another crisis of capitalism.
Yet Kotz demonstrates in the book that faced with the appaling aftermath of the second world war, it was the planned intervention by the Attlee government and the democratic involvement of local government that was able to create a national health service completely free at the point of use.
It secured the nationalisation of key industries so as to create jobs with decent pay and conditions and was able to instigate a huge slum clearance and house building programme to deal with the situation where many had nowhere to live having been bombed out.
The situation then was far worse than we face today but, armed with a massive mandate from the people, the Labour government and its municipal allies were able to put in place a welfare state radically different from the grinding poverty faced before the war.
It is this welfare state that the coalition is seeking to destroy following the template established by Thatcher and endorsed by new Labour.
Kotz is unashamedly "old Labour" and contemptuous of the suits that now dominate the party nationally.
Despite this he remains totally loyal to the party, believing that the members must take control of the inner party democracy and thereby reconnect with the aspirations of ordinary people.
The book is very good at reliving the experiences of a child growing up in a close-knit Jewish community and recounts its solidarity in detail, particularly when the community was threatened by Mosley's fascists at Cable Street.
What little they had was shared with each other.
There is much to learn from a book like this.
To realise that Cameron's Big Society is nothing other than an attempt to return us to the Victorian values of the rich looking after themselves and throwing scraps of care to the lower orders to make themselves feel good.
To realise that there is a real alternative that socialists like John Kotz fought for all of their lives but which was cruelly taken away when the Party was hijacked by people interested in nothing but their own power and personal enrichment.
Read it and strive for socialism.
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POETRY BOOKS & CULTURE- WHY SHOULD NOT OLD MEN BE MAD ?
Updated: 06 Sep 2011
William Butler Yeats -
Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?
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Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream,
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort,
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.
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POETRY BOOKS & CULTURE- HATRED
Updated: 06 Sep 2011
Hatred
Wislawa Szymborska
Look, how constantly capable
and how well maintained
in our century: hatred.
How lightly she regards high impediments.
How easily she leaps and overtakes.
She's not like other feelings.
She's both older and younger than they.
She herself gives birth to causes
which awaken her to life.
If she ever dozes, it's not an eternal sleep.
Insomnia does not sap her strength, but adds to it.
Religion or no religion,
as long as one kneels at the starting-block.
Fatherland or no fatherland,
as long as one tears off at the start.
She begins as fairness and equityt.
Then she propels herself.
Hatred. Hatred.
She veils her face with a mien
of romantic ecstasy.
Oh, the other feelings --
decrepit and sluggish.
Since when could that brotherhood
count on crowds?
Did ever empathy
urge on toward the goal?
How many clients did doubt abduct?
Only she abducts who knows her own. |
Talented, intelligent, very industrious.
Do we need to say how many songs she has written.
How many pages of history she has numbered.
How many carpets of people she has spread out
over how many squares and stadiums!
Let's not lie to ourselves:
She's capable of creating beauty.
Wonderful is her aura on a black night.
Magnificent cloud masses at rosy dawn.
It's difficult to deny her pathos of ruins
and her coarse humor
mightily towering above them columns.
She's the mistress of contrast
between clatter and silence,
between red blood and white snow.
And above all she never tires of
the motif of the tidy hangman
above the defiled victim.
She's ready for new tasks at any moment.
If she must wait she'll wait.
She said she was blind. Blind?
She has the keen eyes of a sniper
and boldly looks into the future
--she alone.
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-translated by Walter Whipple
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POETRY BOOKS & CULTURE- THE NODDING DONKEYS
Updated: 06 Sep 2011
The Nodding Donkeys.
Yes or No, we control the whole show,
Oil in a pipe, increase the flow,
The nodding donkeys do their work,
Pumping dollars from the dirt.
Yes or No, we control the whole show,
Soldiers to war, increase the flow,
The nodding donkeys do their work,
Dying for dollars in deserts and dirt.
Yes or No, we control the whole show,
Voters in an election, increase the flow,
The nodding donkeys do their work,
Saluting the dollar, loving their dirt.
Yes or No, we control the whole show,
Lies on the news, increase the flow,
The nodding donkeys do their work,
Spending dollars to dish the dirt.
Yes or No, we control the whole show,
Crack in a pipe, increase the flow,
The nodding donkeys do their work,
Rocks for dollars, amidst the dirt.
Yes or No, we control the whole show,
Profits in a bank, increase the flow,
The nodding donkeys do their work,
Printing fake dollars with blood and dirt.
Yes or No, we control the whole show,
Obey or die, increase the flow,
The nodding donkeys do their work,
Enslaved by dollars, living in dirt.
Yes or No, we control the whole show,
Nowhere to go, increase the flow,
The nodding donkeys do their work,
Liberty is dead, buried dollar deep in dirt. |
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POETRY BOOKS & CULTURE- THE SUPER RICH SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH - by Stephen Armstrong
Updated: 06 Sep 2011
 When you mention the word 'oligarch' it has a particular resonance with the clique of men whose fortunes were made pillaging Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union - most famous among them Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich and the now jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
However, as journalist Stephen Armstrong proves in his book 'The Super-rich shall inherit the Earth' oligarchs are not solely the preserve of Russia.
While, the not-quite-post-cold-war media is keen to emphasise corruption in Russia, we know very little of the internal affairs of the other 'BRIC' nations: Brazil, India and China - which all have very similar oligarchical systems in which a super-rich elite evades any government regulation or control and in which government seemingly serves their global power interests.
The sub-title of the book, 'The new global oligarchs and how they're taking over our world' reflects the emphasis that is given to these emerging world power states. It describes the litany of corporate manslaughter, government corruption, embezzlement, defrauding of entire population's resources.
After six chapters one could easily get the disconcerting feeling a message of 'and that is why we must defend the West!' coming at the end.
Those hoping for a comfortable portrayal of the evils of Johnny foreigner, against the great democratic [sic] Anglo-Saxon model will be disappointed.
The brickbats aren't just reserved for the BRICs.
In the final four chapters, Armstrong looks with intense scrutiny at the global oligarchs in the US and the UK, including - in a move bound to delight all UK Uncutters - chapter 9 'In which Philip Green couldn't give a fuck'.
This book sadly written before the incoming coalition government had appointed the knighted-under-New Labour Sir Philip to carry out a review of government spending and procurement.
Another chapter details the in-crowd of Goldman Sachs as they migrate from government to investment bank and back again.
It also explains why Lehmann Brothers was left to collapse while Goldman Sachs was saved.
All in all this is a refreshing look at the global economy: massive and growing inequality, freedom for the super-rich and increasing authoritarianism for the poor, and government no longer able or willing to defend its citizens against mobile global capital.
While Marx argued that the working man has no country, it is very clear that the super-rich require a sponsor nation - and they have several corrupt jurisdictions to choose from.
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POETRY BOOKS & CULTURE- DECLINE & FALL-OLIVER CROMWELL: NEW PERSPECTIVES by Partick Little
Updated: 05 Sep 2011
Decline & Fall - Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives
by Patrick Little (Palgrave Macmillan, £17.99)
Monday 29 August 2011
David Morgan
A new view of Cromwell as a Welshman with close and abiding affinities to the Leveller cause emerges from this new collection of essays.
Christopher Hill's classic study of Cromwell, God's Englishman, was published in 1970 and there have been countless books about the great Commonwealth and republican leader since then - revisionist accounts have sought to portray Cromwell as a man of contradictions, others have set out to establish that he was at best a flawed hero, a hypocrite and a religious zealot.
Cromwell's reputation on the left has been much tarnished by his feud with John Lilburne as he has commonly been portrayed as the villain to the latter's solid man of principle.
A very different view in this book gives a more detailed picture of Cromwell's associations with the Levellers, particularly with William Walwyn, who often remains in the shadow of Lilburne.
Philip Baker explains that Cromwell was sympathetic to Leveller ideas over a much longer period than is often appreciated.
In another illuminating contribution, Lloyd Bowen describes the Welsh family background of Cromwell and how this influenced his outlook.
While the Welshness of the Williams "alias Cromwell" side of the family is briefly mentioned by Hill, he makes very little of it.
In contrast, Bowen shows how Cromwell took great pride in his Welsh roots and took up the Welsh cause in Parliament on various occasions in the early 1640s when he was gaining a reputation as a militant puritan activist.
Bowen argues that Cromwell's important links with Wales have been almost completely ignored in both popular and academic literature.
Patrick Little sheds new light on the controversial circumstances surrounding the offer of the crown to Cromwell in 1657 and his refusal to accept it.
The offer came during a period of high tension following the foiling of an assassination attempt on Cromwell by royalists.
According to Little the "Sindercombe" plot's significance has never been "taken seriously" by historians but he claims that it shook the confidence of the republican regime quite severely.
The offer of the crown was something of a desperate bid to frustrate royalist attempts to deny the legitimacy of the regime.
Other articles cover Cromwell's role in the first civil war, his early parliamentary career, Cromwell's court, his record in Ireland and the upbringing of his successor Richard Cromwell.
It's a refreshing and highly readable series of reappraisals of a figure who is still a controversial one in English radical history more than 350 years after his death.
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POETRY BOOKS & CULTURE - TOP GIRLS AT TRAFALGAR STUDIOS, LONDON
Updated: 26 Aug 2011
Top Girls
Monday 22 August 2011
Ciaran Bermingham
"Well of course I just owe almost everything to my own father," Margaret Thatcher famously said when she first entered Number 10.
This wasn't going to be the last time that the Iron Lady induced a collective rush for the sick bucket across the nation.
But this bizarre statement also disproved those who mistakenly thought she had any interest in improving the lives of working women
Top Girls is a pertinent reminder that Tory individualism and the interests of feminism can never be reconciled.
Caryl Churchill's 1982 play opens with a familiar dinner party scene, where the role of fathers is discussed even though men remain significantly absent throughout.
The unfamiliar guests include the 19th-century explorer Isabella Bird, a figure from medieval Japanese history Lady Nijo and the only ever female pope, Joan.
They talk about their struggles but also their achievements in a poignant scene where laughter and tears coexist, often indistinguishably.
Churchill wants us to know that these historically forgotten women would never have been accredited by Thatcher when becoming prime minister.
Suranne Jones plays Marlene in this welcome revival, whose story runs the whole way through the play and binds elements of fantasy with early 1980s realism.
The incoming managing director of Top Girls employment agency, she is aptly portrayed, sympathetically and satirically, in Jones's performance. This combination shouldn't work, but the fact that it does shows one of the many reasons why the play is rightfully a classic of modern theatre.
Jones rises to the challenges of the role and when Marlene's estranged daughter Angie (Olivia Poulet) turns up to her City office in wellies she is met with the hard-nosed disinterest of someone who has sacrificed their family for their career.
But the cracks in this front are difficult to hide. A flashback to the year before reveals a more vulnerable Marlene unable to connect to the family she has left behind for the City.
Joyce, played by Stella Gonet, is her jaded sister. Having brought up Angie as her own, she is the bitter counterweight to Marlene's success.
The structure of Top Girls might be disjointed, but the anti-capitalist message manages to be both consistent and undogmatic.
Like all the other women characters, those who attend the employment agency must accept the inhumanity of a ruthless "jobs market" where unemployment is high and social conscience low.
Unfortunately their depiction sometimes slips into retro caricature, glossing over some of the disturbing parallels with today.
This is however the only real criticism which can be directed at Max Stafford-Clark's timely production, with its versatile all-female cast.
It is easy to see why this exploration of sexual, political and class politics has made a successful transfer from Chichester Theatre here to Trafalgar Studios. With Downing Street just yards away, Cameron et al would do well to make the short walk to see this savage yet subtle critique of Thatcherism.
Runs until October 29. Box office: (020) 7492-1532.
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POETRY BOOKS & CULTURE- OPEN SEASON:THE NEIL LENNON STORY by George Galloway
Updated: 22 Aug 2011
At last it is here, the story of last season's sectarian and racist campaign to drive Neil Lennon out of Scotland.
Open Season: The Neil Lennon Story by George Galloway explodes the history of Scotland's shame, anti Irish Catholic racism and bigotry, and the culpability of the Scottish establishment in attempting to sweep it under the carpet.
Sparing no reputation, no hallowed institution, Galloway holds a mirror up to the political cowardice, rank opportunism and prejudice that is every bit as entrenched in Scotland's culture today as it was over 100 years ago.
Galloway's reputation for saying what needs to be said has never been more deserved.
Open Season is required reading by everyone with an interest in knowing what happened last season and why.
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Poetry, Books and Culture
