Scholar, courtier, magician: the lost library of John Dee
- Address: The Royal College of Physicians, 11 St Andrews Place, Regent's Park, London, NW1 4LE
Books & Internet Resources
Revolutions in Reverse
The Luddites - without condescension
Unwelcome Guests
Weaponizing Anthropology
Crack Capitalism
Poetry Classics and Class
Libraries at Risk
Lessons from Howard Zinn
Mark Twain - autobiography storms the US best-sellers charts
The Re-enchantment of Place
THE HIVE OF LIBERTY
Pamphlets were always the lifeblood of radical movements, so its good to see The Hive of Liberty back in print:
THE HIVE OF LIBERTY: THE LIFE & WORK OF THOMAS SPENCE (1750-1814)
Edited by Keith Armstrong, with an introduction by Joan Beal and a new essay by Malcolm Chase
This reprint from the Thomas Spence Tryst is a celebration of that noted pioneer of people’s rights, pampleteer and poet Thomas Spence, born on Newcastle’s Quayside in turbulent times.
Spence served in his father’s netmaking trade from the age of ten but went on later to be a teacher at Haydon Bridge Free Grammar School and at St. Ann’s Church in Byker under the City Corporation. In 1775, he read his famous lecture on the right to property in land to the Newcastle Philosophical Society, who voted his expulsion at their next meeting. He claimed to have invented the phrase ‘The Rights of Man’ and chalked it in the caves at Marsden Rocks in South Shields in honour of the working-class hero ‘Blaster Jack’ who lived there.
Spence even came to blows with famed Tyneside wood-engraver Thomas Bewick over a political issue, and was thrashed with cudgels for his trouble. From 1792, having moved to London, he took part in radical agitations, particularly against the war with France. He was arrested several times for selling his own and other seditious books and was imprisoned for six months without trial in 1794, and sentenced to three years for his Restorer of Society to its Natural State in 1801. Whilst politicians such as Edmund Burke saw the mass of people as the ‘Swinish Multitude’, Spence saw creative potential in everybody and broadcast his ideas in the periodical Pigs’ Meat.
He had a stall in London’s Chancery Lane, where he sold books and saloup, and later set up a small shop called The Hive of Liberty in Holborn.
He died in poverty ‘leaving nothing to his friends but an injunction to promote his Plan and the remembrance of his inflexible integrity’.
The Thomas Spence Trust has successfully campaigned for a commemorative plaque on the Quayside in Newcastle. It was unveiled on 21st June 2010, Spence's 260th birthday, with a number of talks, displays and events coinciding with it.
PRICE £5 ISBN 1 871536 15 4
ORDERS (ADD £2 POSTAGE PER COPY) TO: THE THOMAS SPENCE TRUST,
93 WOODBURN SQUARE, WHITLEY LODGE, WHITLEY BAY, TYNE & WEAR NE26 3JD, ENGLAND. TEL 0191 2529531.
Libraries in a Digital Age
Libraries in a Digital Age is a one-day conference organised by the Association of Independent Libraries which will be held in the lecture theatre at the Royal Astronomical Society on Thursday 14 October. There will be presentations on social networking; the Oxford Google Books digitization partnership; the publishing industry; the future of public libraries; the knowledge commons and copyright. Conference participants will also be able to take part in a tour of Royal Astronomical Society Library. Full programme details and booking form are available on the AIL website: |
Cities Under Siege: the New Urban Militarism
Housing the Urban Poor
Banned Books on tour
Music is a Crime
Google's All-Seeing Eye
Media Commons
What was that Programme?
The Rat Pack
Johann Hari reviews Chomsky: Hopes and Prospects
The works of Gerard Winstanley
Jose Saramago dies
" In recent years photography appears to be resurfacing as a site of heated political contestation. This comes amid a flood of arbitrary and often downright bizarre interpretations of privacy, security and public order rules, by police, community safety wardens, private security guards or self appointed ‘jobsworths’. Decisions to prevent photography in public places often appear capricious and overbearing, enforced through intimidation rather than lawful authority, with official explanations after the event simply adding insult to injury. In a climate of fear and
suspicion, fuelled by alarming reports of terrorist alerts and predatory paedophiles,
uncertainties around the limits of personal freedom appear to be making room for a new and muddled form of authoritarianism."
Crowd Science and the Knowledge Commons
Libraries
Love Among the Butterflies
Radio Waves
"Our tendency to idealise the countryside hasn't always reflected the reality of rural life. But it provides a fascinating glimpse of our dreams and fears as a society.
Out of the insurrection and radicalism of the 1840s came the idea of the countryside as a place of freedom and independence from the squalor and sweat of industrial servitude. In 1842 Feargus O'Connor, the charismatic leader of the Chartists, drew up the Land Plan, which showed how ordinary people across Britain, could plough their own furrow.For O'Connor a plot of rural land had the capacity to deliver financial independence and social dignity to the poor."
Although I am pleased to see Chartist land scheme given coverage - the intention of the Chartists was not to make the poor financially "independent and dignified" but an attempt to transform the relations of production at a time when the relentless enclosure of common land had impoverished vast numbers of people, who were being forced into wage slavery by the privitisation of land, state terror, and the transformation of the economy by industrial capitalism. It will be interesting to see the context in which the programme sets the land scheme.
Also worth catching is the Radio 3 'Words and Music' programme on Sunday(10.15 pm), which brings together a series of short readings under the heading The Rebel: