Renting from an unscrupulous private landlord can mean cold rooms, damage to your health and lack of privacy. Worst of all is the insecurity of a ‘no fault’ eviction, legal under Section 21 of the 1988 Housing Act, making it difficult for tenants to make long-term plans, or for their children to settle in school.
Drawing on their own careful research and one author’s personal experience of eviction, this book exposes the realities of living in privately-rented accommodation in the UK.
Through interviews with landlords…
Reviews
Spanning the century from 1910 to 2010, this engaging social history shows how a group of people without wealth or power (the working class) were able to gain some measure of control over their lives before losing it again.
In 1910, competent servants had a place for life, but they had to ‘know their place’, accepting decisions made for them by their ‘betters’ ‘in their best interests’.
Todd shows how assertiveness replaced deference as domestic staff entered factories, gaining better wages and conditions.
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Before its use in the context of war and peace, the term ‘conscientious objector’ referred to someone who refused vaccination.
In 1853, Britain’s Vaccination Act made the vaccination of infants compulsory. Despite fines, imprisonment and the seizure of their property, vaccination was widely resisted by working-class people, who sometimes likened their predicament to slavery. Their resistance finally led to the introduction of a ‘conscience clause’ in 1898.
Early vaccine refusers were also ‘among the first to…
Every now and then, I come across a new author whose writing blows me away. Yusuf Toropov’s debut novel , Jihadi: A Love Story is one such book.
The novel is presented as the memoirs of a former CIA agent (Liddell), annotated by the psychiatrist who interrogated him. With both writers interpreting events according to their own world view, what unfolds is a narrative where the reader is uncertain of the reliability of either version of events. This is a brilliant way to write about the war on terror, as it allows for…
In this short but timely introduction, leading US anti-war academic and activist Phyllis Bennis examines the rapid growth of Islamic State and the rise of the new global war on terror waged by the US and its allies in the Middle East.
Written in a question/answer format, Bennis addresses a series of questions including: What are the origins of ISIS? What was behind the US decision to escalate military involvement in the Middle East in 2014? and: Isn’t military force necessary when faced with such a violent force as ISIS?
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In a time of ‘metastasisizing security’ – as Fiona Jeffries describes our current situation of ever-tighter state control – it is important to examine the role of fear in contemporary politics. In conversation with writers, activists and artists, Jeffries investigates examples from history and the recent past in which powerful groups have cultivated fear. And she also looks at the many creative ways in which people and movements have responded.
The result is a good introduction to a bottom-up history of the struggles of the poor…
In this passionate and readable book academic and commentator Roslyn Fuller takes apart the belief that, to quote Paul Weller, ‘the public gets what the public wants’.
According to Fuller, in Western democracies the popular will is stifled and twisted by a plethora of pressures. Top of her list is the nefarious influence of corporate financing, with money the deciding factor in around 80 percent of various elections, according to studies she cites. The serious problems with the UK’s creaking ‘first past the post’ voting system…
This is one of those rare books that transforms the way you think about a well-worn topic. Written mainly for those with an interest in process and the ways in which organisations function, it presents readers with a new organisational model with the potential to completely alter the way we structure our groups, businesses, schools, hospitals and indeed any organisation of any kind.
Author Frederic Laloux conducted research with people working in organisations across a wide range of sectors, all of which have forgone traditional…
After 60 years of making music, radical English singer-songwriter Leon Rosselson turns his attention to the post-financial-crash political landscape in this new album, made up of original compositions and rescued old songs.
On the title track, 'Karl Marx is scratching his head/they ought to be shooting the bankers/But they’re giving them money instead'. 'Looters' finds Rosselson comparing the rioters of August 2011 with the industrial-scale, officially-sanctioned looting carried out by 'the Brutish Empire', while 'Sixty Quid A Week'…
Despite its title this is not a book about whales, or even a book about whale research itself. Rather it focuses on the politics of the international whale research effort and on the gradual dawning of awareness regarding whales and dolphins (collectively known as cetaceans) in a human population, most of whom had never seen any of the great sea mammals.
Burnett traces whale research from the earliest days of the twentieth century, when a British researcher, Sydney Harmer, tried to use the limited scientific data of his day to…
In 1951, Frantz Fanon qualified as a psychiatrist in France. Shocked at being treated as a second-class citizen after moving to France from his native Martinique, his first book, Black Skin, White Masks developed a theory of identity in the face of racism. He came to believe that Algeria could acts as the touch paper for igniting the liberation of Africa, and it was there that he became a committed activist.
Before his early death from leukemia, he worked with both the victims and the perpetrators of violence in his practice…
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born into an aristocratic family in 1792, the year that Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and he died just short of his thirtieth birthday. He did not achieve great fame or fortune during his whirlwind of a life – the publisher John Murray described him as ‘the vilest wretch in existence’ – but his poems and pamphlets were circulated amongst radicals at the time and his work is now embedded in our literary establishment.
The period 1792–1822 was a politically…
Many Western activists would agree that it has never been easier to raise public awareness about human rights abuses and conflicts around the world. With the rise of social media, celebrity advocacy and marketing campaigns, it is now possible to reach millions of people with a single mouse click, compelling individuals and policy makers to act quickly and decisively. But does a wider audience always equal success and if so, what is its price?
By exploring a broad range of international campaigns, this collection of essays…
The extraordinary life of Rosa Luxemburg – Marxist economist, cat-lover and legendary figure of the revolutionary left – is given a memorable graphic novel treatment in Kate Evans’ latest book.
A ‘fictional representation of factual events’, it takes us from her childhood in Poland (tasked by her school with writing a poem for the visit of the German kaiser, she produced one attacking ‘that creeping toad Bismarck’), through her pre-First World War revolutionary agitation in Poland and Germany (which led to her imprisonment in the…
Eileen Flanagan is a Quaker, spiritual writer and climate change activist.
This book tells the story of her journey from young and idealistic Peace Corps teacher in Botswana to 50-year- old mother handcuffing herself to the White House fence to defend the environment. This is a wonderful book full of nourishing wisdom, courage and humour. I found Flanagan’s style immediately engaging, with a good balance of information and anecdote, and the pace of a good novel. She combines stories of her own life and her Irish ancestry with…