As humanity emerged from the long dark night of the Middle Ages, the ideas of religious and monarchical hegemony began to be challenged. Foremost among those doing this important work of demystification and enlightenment was Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man and The Age of Reason.
BOOK REVIEW: In God’s Shadow: Politics In The Hebrew Bible Read Post »
Hitchens was a man of many unresolved contradictions. How anyone could find Mrs Thatcher sexy is beyond me. And there are far better examples of the distillers’ art than Walker’s Black Label. But if his writing about Paine encourages people to read Paine’s works he will have earned his redemption.
English radical poetry has a long and honourable tradition dating back to at least the 17th century. Paine played a small but significant role in this tradition. He was a great influence on the Chartist movement which arose in the 1830s to demand the vote for working men.
On the one hand there is Karl Marx, a Communist and political exile in London, on the other Charles Bradlaugh, who rose from humble origins to become the leading nineteenth century advocate of Secularism and a MP for Northampton. Both were political giants.
BOOK REVIEW: Bradlaugh Contra Marx, Radicalism And Socialism In The First International Read Post »
Plato wanted poetry banned in his republic. Like many totalitarian reactionaries he saw poetry as essentially subversive. This book shows the relationship between poetry and three generations of a family which if not subversive were at the very least politically radical.
By Terry Liddle Two Cocks On The Dunghill, William Cobbett and Henry Hunt: Their Friendship, feuds and fights. Penny Young. Twopenny Press, South Lopham, Norfolk, 2009. 384pp Paperback, ISBN 978-0-9561703-0-9. £17.95 There have been numerous biographies of William Cobbett, but only one of Henry Hunt although Hunt was no less an important and prominent figure
Thomas Paine called himself a citizen of the world and as if to sustain this claim was an active revolutionary in Britain, France and America. If any one of his contemporaries deserves the title more it is William Duane.
BOOK REVIEW: Transoceanic Radical: William Duane Read Post »
Abraham Lincoln, the father of the modern Republican Party, was converted to deism by reading The Age of Reason. He wrote a pamphlet extolling Paine’s views which his friends tossed into the stove. Even the bumbling third rate movie actor Ronald Reagan could quote Paine.
BOOK REVIEW: Thomas Paine His Life, His Time and The Birth of Modem Nations Read Post »
Described by T. E. Uttley of the Daily Telegraph as “that evil man Tom Paine”, Thomas Paine was for generations of radicals, secularists and republicans an example and an inspiration. My first port of call was the Great Harry public house in Woolwich.
Paine’s Influence On 19th And 20th Century Radicals, Secularists And Republicans Read Post »
Robert Aspland wrote a substantial memoir in the Monthly Repository that Joyce “displayed his earnestness chiefly when exposing the misrepresentations of sophists and the calumnies of bigots. He was tolerant of all but baseness and hypocrisy.”
BOOK REVIEW: Jeremiah Joyce, Radical, Dissenter and Writer Read Post »
Could this be the same Harry Harmer who was a South London contact for Republic in the 1980s? Why having written on Martin Luther King, the Labour party and slavery he chooses to write a biography of Paine when there are already enough of them to fill a small library?
BOOK REVIEW: Tom Paine, The Life of a Revolutionary Read Post »
Because it advocated the franchise, Anarchists were critical of the Suffragette movement. However, it should be noted that Sylvia Pankhurst’s group which became the Workers’ Socialist Federation would share many of the Anarchists’ criticisms of the outcome of the 1917 Russian Revolution.
BOOK REVIEW: Anarchist Ideas And Counter-Cultures In Britain, 1880-1914 Read Post »
