Cloves, Jeff

On 5 March 2007, a car bomb was detonated on Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. It killed more than 30 people, wounded more than 100 and destroyed many businesses in the heart of a quarter famous for its bookshops, outdoor bookstalls, literary cafés, publishing houses and free-thinking society. The street was extensively damaged but re-opened in December 2008. May it thrive and ferment again. It wasn’t…

On the back of his precocious autobiography Sum Total, first published when he was 23, Ray is quoted: ‘I am for the working classes, for the underdog, for the seedy and the left behind… and the England that seemed and still seems an impossible dream.’

In a dim corner of Ray’s home from home, the Hard To Find Café in Nottingham, where I attended his wake, the photographs on display told their own story: young good-looking Ray, slight of build with attempted Tony…

I went recently to a public meeting about the government’s proposed ‘gagging’ bill. It was packed and angry and Stroud’s Tory MP found himself trying to defend the indefensible. He’d been very badly briefed by his own party, couldn’t cope with the well-informed questioners, and was driven to a position whereby he feebly asked us to take his word for it that ‘this bill is well-intentioned’. Cue jeers of derision.

In fact, we all know the bill is a dangerous assault on freedom of speech…

How powerfully songs can hit you in the heart and make the impact that politicians struggle to achieve with their leaden delivery and faux sincerity. Thus Margaret Thatcher and her protégé young master Blair spring to mind.

Songs, however, can almost leap from the radio such are their intensity.

Elvis Costello achieved this with ‘Oliver’s army’ – the best song to have emerged from Ireland’s modern troubles – and his heartbreaking response to the Falklands…

How the media loves anniversaries and now I’m at it too; it hardly seems 10 months ago let alone 10 years that war was declared on Iraq. Saddam was the excuse, war was the result, and the number of Iraqis who’ve died in consequence will be forever disputed. What PN readers may agree upon is that one death was one too many.

What the peace group here in Stroud was, and is, agreed upon was that, from the…

Utopia is the second of Five Leaves’ annual journals and features contributions from 23 writers, essayists, songwriters, poets – some living, some dead – loosely based on the subject of utopia; although Utopias (plural) might read more accurately.

Books about Utopia(s) are always necessary, but with our supine parliament and the monumental lack of inspiration and aspiration exhibited by its constituent MPs, how absolutely necessary this one is now. Mike Marqusee’s opening essay is…

In 1963, what was then London Transport transported me to The Theatre Royal Stratford East and there I saw its legendary production of Oh What a Lovely War! It is an evening I will never forget; not least because I sat behind an elderly man who began to weep as the mounting casualty figures of the First World War flashed up on the illuminated screen suspended over the set. 

This simple but heartrending device continued to the end of the evening and so did his weeping. His tears…

In 1970, I met, at peace activist Dennis Gould's home in Cornwall, an unassuming musician and writer of, it seemed to me, indisputable talent and originality. He'd just had his first LP Bill Fay released and I was so impressed, I wrote a piece about him in the rock magazine Zigzag.

This launched a valued friendship with Bill which was marked last month, by the release of his third commissioned studio album, Life is People, to a set of rave reviews unequalled in my…

Recently I was at a film show of pro-cycling films promoted by the excellent and innovative campaigning collective Bicycology.

The films were of variable quality and content and mostly strident in their opposition to car ownership and use.

Now whether such stridency is counter-productive is another debate but, as I’ve often mentioned in this column, PN’s embrace and promotion of cycling as a peaceful and healthy means of transport runs through its make-up like the…

Sometimes I try – like many PN readers I guess – to imagine myself in the position of a bereaved family in a civil war and know that revenge would be uppermost in my mind.

The intention to make somebody pay and suffer the same terrible loss and pain as yourself is near-irresistible and, maybe, even human nature.

Throughout my life, state gangsterism and political perfidy have sent me…

For the whole of my life so far, civil war has raged somewhere in the world and there seems no end in sight. In Spain, 75 years ago, the army led by general Franco staged a military coup against the legally-elected Republican government and the resulting civil war lasted for nearly three years. Franco’s army – boosted by the support of Hitler and Mussolini – eventually triumphed, and his dictatorship survived from 1939 until 1975. The political,social and cultural fall-out from this bitter…

There has been a Saturday morning peace picket in Stroud's High Street since the build-up to the Iraq war. This is my pitch for selling PN and seasonal white poppies but I've only just discovered -- to my chagrin -- that the picket predates the arrival of our family in Stroud and has been going on since the war in Kosovo.

The picket is small but, as I've lately been made aware, admirably persistent. It has become part of the street furniture so to speak and this year our…

A bit of autobiography. Bear with me, there’s reason.

While recuperating from a bicycle accident, I’ve been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s Letters to Sartre – in particular those written during the immediate run-up to the German occupation of France in 1940. My mum told me of her dread when, on 3 September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Libyan mothers must be in even more dread now their country has declared war on itself.

My dad, a sheet metal worker, was…

The most memorable film I saw in 2010 – at the cinema or on TV – was Julien Temple’s visionary TV documentary Requiem for Detroit.

The most memorable book I read was Richard Mabey’s Weeds. The two are linked. Both produced a surge of hope within me which ran contra to a generalised feeling of despair against which I was battling. Still am. Both works are concerned with – to put it crudely – the survival of the natural world in the teeth of our man-made conspiracy to destroy…

Sheila – a doughty campaigner against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – is currently in hospital in London. She had a bad fall in a departure lounge and misaligned her spine. She is paralysed for the time being; her holiday ended before it began. Her friends in Stroud visit when possible and others write. A letter sent on her behalf in the first week of November, asked us to send her a white poppy.

If Sheila is able to watch TV from her hospital bed she will have observed the…