A Devilish Kind of Courage

The tale of a notorious 1911 London gunfight, the ‘Siege of Sidney Street’, and its consequences.

More details of the book on the publisher’s website…

On 3 January 1911, in the heart of London’s mainly Jewish East End, police discovered Latvian revolutionaries wanted for the murder of three officers. A six-hour gunfight ensued, with a fire consuming the besieged building. Read on ...

Larisa Reisner. A Biography

Speaker is Cathy Porter, author of a new biography of Larisa Reisner

‘She burst across the revolutionary sky like a blazing meteor, dazzling all in her path,’ Trotsky wrote. For the poet Boris Pasternak, she was Lara, the heroine of his novel Doctor Zhivago. Commissar, revolutionary fighter, espionage agent, journalist, Larisa Reisner (1895–1926) was a model for the ‘new woman’ of the Russian Revolution, and one of its most popular and brilliant writers, whose works were published in mass editions and read by millions. Read on ...

Decadent Women

Yellow Book Lives by Jad Adams

Chronicles the vibrant and passionate women who wrote for the 1890s journal The Yellow Book.

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During the 1890s, British women for the first time began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom. Read on ...

The “New” Lukács

An on-line talk to mark the anniversary of the publication of History and Class Consciousness
Speaker Andrew Feenberg

The initial reception of Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness was almost entirely negative. Non-Marxists didn’t like his Marxism and Marxist disliked his borrowings from contemporary social science and philosophy. From 1923, when the book was first published, until the 1960s when a new generation of readers discovered it, History and Class Consciousness largely disappeared from both history and consciousness. Read on ...