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 ]

Stuart Holland features in a guest post - 'Revisiting the Juncker Recovery Proposals' - on Yanis Varoufakis' blog, available here . Yanis also thoughtfully mentions Stuart's recent publication  Europe in Question: and what to do about it , published by Spokesman. ISBN: 978 0 85124 835 6 Price: £15 as paperback or £9.99 as eBook http://www.spokesmanbooks.com/acatalog/Stuart_Holland.html

Our recent title A Pacifist at War caught the eye of James Walker at LeftLion magazine. You can read his review here: http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm/title/book-reviews--february-2015/id/7228 A Pacifist at War: Letters and Writings 1914-1918 Edited by Nicholas Griffin ISBN: 978 0 85124 870 Price: £9.99 Available online from Spokesman Books at http://www.spokesmanbooks.com/acatalog/New_Products.html

In late 2014, the US Navy awarded an $84 million cost-plus-fixed-fee modification contract for 'tactical missile tube manufacturing'. In total, according to the US Navy, 17 missile tubes will be manufactured: '12 for the UK Successor lead ship, four for the OR [Ohio class ballistic missile submarine Replacement] First Article Quad Pack and one for the Strategic Weapons System - Ashore (SWSA) test facility.' What is this arcane language telling us? The $84 millions is to fund 'joint United States and United Kingdom Common Missile Compartment (CMC) missile tube manufacturing'. According to Rob Edwards ( Sunday Herald , 23.11.14), 70 per cent of this cost is being paid by the UK. Curiously, 12 of the first 17 tubes are for the 'UK successor lead ship'. This is curious for two reasons. Firstly, the UK government has deferred until 2016 the 'main-gate' decision on Trident replacement. Secondly, the UK government has repeatedly claimed in publi...

Based in Athens, The Paragraph offers an informed and humorous perspective on Greek and Global affairs, born of a longstanding relationship with the Russell Foundation (the 'Northern Garrison'). It suggests some ways in which people outside Greece can help in the long struggle to reverse austerity and all its ills.   *** Hello dear Paragraph readers, We that hope all of you, here and abroad, are doing OK. We apologise for the delay in informing you about the atmosphere here in Athens after the recent election, the resounding SYRIZA victory, and the formation of the new patriotic coalition government in Greece. Why the delay? There were, as you shall see, many events taking place and also we were (as most of the Greeks, regardless of what they voted for) somehow overwhelmed by emotion. What would come out would be (very mediocre) poetry, but not a good report... In order to make our report more useful we decided to ...