Category: Past SHS Meetings
Valentine Ackland
A Transgressive Life
Speaker: Frances Bingham
Valentine Ackland was a poet, gender-rebel, and lover of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner. For much of her life she was under MI5 surveillance for ‘abnormality’ as well as Communism. This talk about Ackland’s transgressive life, by her biographer Frances Bingham, considers her lifelong political activism – which included volunteering for the Spanish Civil War – and the personal politics of her gender deviance. Read on ...
Socialism in the English-Speaking Caribbean seminar series
The Socialist History Society, The Institute of Commonwealth Studies and The Society for Caribbean Studies will be holding a series of online research seminars.
The participants have been invited to submit written papers in advance of the seminars. These will be available to everyone who registers.
Attendance is free, but advance registration is necessary. Read on ...
A materialist approach to fascism – past and present
Speaker: Paul Mason
2pm, Saturday, 26th February 2022
The far right is on the rise across the world. From Modi’s India to Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Erdogan’s Turkey, fascism is not a horror that we have left in the past; it is a recurring nightmare that is happening again – and we need to find a better way to fight it. Read on ...
Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and his Books
A compelling intellectual biography of Stalin told through his personal library
A Socialist History Society meeting with historian Geoffrey Roberts.
In this engaging life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. Read on ...