Spokesman Books

'Raymond Williams was one of the left's great thinkers - he deserves to be rediscovered' So asserts Geoff Dayer's recent New Statesman article. We reproduce it here. Follow this link for Spokesman Books' selection of works by Williams: http://www.spokesmanbooks.com/acatalog/Raymond_Williams.html *** A hero of the 1968 generation, Raymond Williams was inextricably linked to where he came from and common experience. In an era of diluted politics, it's time to return to his work. “I come from Pandy . . .” The first words spoken by Raymond Williams in  Politics and Letters:   Interviews with New Left Review  (1979) may not have quite the rolling loquacity of the opening line of Saul Bellow’s  Adventures of Augie March  – “I am an American, Chicago born . . .” – but in their brisk way they bespeak a similar confidence. Bellow’s narrator immediately situates his experience in the heart of America; Williams announced one of his main concerns in the...

Frances O’Grady, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, will give the inaugural Ken Coates Memorial Lecture at the University of Nottingham   (Law and Social Sciences Building) on Wednesday 3 June 2015 at 6.30pm , a few weeks after the General Election. Ken Coates died on 27 June 2010, in his eightieth year. He was a prolific author whose work included the Penguin Classic  Poverty: The Forgotten Englishmen , about the St Ann’s district of Nottingham, co-authored with Richard Silburn. The Times commented: ‘Writing with compassion, style, wit and an almost complete lack of jargon, [they] present us with inescapable facts which must remould our thinking and our actions.’ During the 1960s, Bertrand Russell invited Ken Coates to work with him  at the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. This was to lead to location of the Foundation’s offices in Nottingham, where they remain to this day. Ken Coates edited The Spokesman, the Foundation’s journal, for 40 years; he als...

As the anniversary of the death of Albert Einstein approaches (April 18th), we present here a link to our recent article ‘Einstein and Russell’, which appears in The Spokesman issue 127: Trident Undone . It includes a short poem Einstein penned on Russell in 1940. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxLLsmUQZieJYldQNlJWVjczekU/view?usp=sharing [ copy and paste link into address bar ]