The best book to give a full historical account of Ned Kelley’s life is Ian Jones's excellent 1995 biography. Jones tells us that Kelly was a heroic man maddened by injustice and driven to become an outlaw as a result of his struggle against oppression. However if you want to find out what it may have really felt like to be Ned Kelley read The True History of the Kelley Gang. Carey succeeds in giving this extraordinary man a voice and makes him achingly real. His life story is narrated […]
Update (October 2013): the article seems to have reappeared on The Spectator website. On October 16th 2004 The Spectator published an unsigned editorial by Boris Johnson (aparently with a little help from Simon Heffer) in which he stated that Liverpool fans were wallowing in self pity when they themselves were responsible for the Hillsborough disaster. This article has since gone missing from The Spectator online archive. In an attempt to prevent it being airbrushed from history, here are the […]
On April 15, 1989 I was sitting in the North Stand at Hillsborough with a perfect view of the Leppings Lane end. Along with 40,000-odd other people I witnessed what has now been described as the biggest cover up in modern British history. How can you cover up something which is witnessed by over 40,000 people? As a 19-year-old, I returned to college after the spring break to read and watch reports of events which I knew to be false. It was not just The Sun. False reports were published by the […]
This novel is set in Oxford during the restoration in the 1660s, a time of complex intellectual, scientific, religious and political ferment and uses a mix of both real and fictitious historical figures. The murder of Dr Robert Grove, a fellow of New College, and the events surrounding it are narrated from four significantly different points of view. Marco da Cola, a Venetian Catholic doctor newly arrived in Britain; Jack Prescott, son of a Royalist traitor and desperate to clear his father’s […]
A Review of 'Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law' by E.P.Thompson ‘Christ died as an unbeliever’ [William Blake] ‘Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! we have Hirelings in the Camp. the Court. & the University: who would if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War’ [William Blake] Watching the Olympic opening ceremony the other night I noticed that the hymn Jerusalem so beloved of public schools, […]
By A L Morton The Ranters formed the extreme left wing of the sects which came into prominence during the English Revolution, both theologically and politically. Theologically these sects lay between the poles of orthodox Calvinism, with its emphasis on the power and justice of God as illustrated in the grand scheme of election and reprobation, with its insistence upon the reality of Hell in all its most literal horrors and upon the most verbal and dogmatic acceptance of the Scriptures, and of […]
Not A BRHG Event
This year's 'Newport Chartist Convention' is being held at the City Campus of the University at Newport from 11am to 3pm Key note speaker: Professor Malcolm Chase (Leeds University) "Welsh Chartism: Looking beyond November 1839" Malcolm Chase is the leading Chartist historian in the UK today - author of 'Chartism: a new history" (2007) In this lecture, Professor Chase will draw upon his recent Llafur article (2010) "Rethinking Welsh Chartism" and place the Rising at Newport in 1839 into a […]
Now and again certain key industrial disputes serve as a reminder that the state not only plays a central role in struggles between capital and labour, but that its interventions tend to be heavily biased towards employers. One such dispute concerned the abolition of the National Dock Labour Scheme (NDLS) in 1989, and the return of casual employment. In this case, state intervention was not only decisive in curtailing the ability of trade unions to take strike action but also delivered to the […]
This year is seeing a veritable frenzy of spectaculars encouraging the sad old supremecist idea that Being British is something to be jolly well/fucking proud of, what with all our institutions and history and achievements. Our diversity in particular has been cited as a significant reason we got lumbered with the Olympics and the French didn't. Anybody wishing to read something that presents a less uncritical evaluation of these ideas and an unsanitised history of some of the "achievements" […]
The history of radical 'White' activism in the 1960s and 70s in the USA is dominated by the the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a large organisation which was very influential in the creation of what is known as the 'New Left'. Much has been written about their activities in the Universities particularly around resistance to the Vietnam War and their eventual split which led to urban armed groups such as the Weather Underground. However, this interesting book uncovers the hidden history […]
