East Midlands' Rebels

David Bell, author of The Dirty Thirty - on the Leicestershire striking miners, is starting a new book for Five Leaves on East Midlands' Rebels. This will be a popular (as opposed to academic) book, and be published in 2012 or 2013 depending on how big it gets. David has drawn up an initial list of people to cover, which includes (by way of example) Brian Clough, Lord Byron, Alan Sillitoe, Eric Irons (Black activist), Elizabeth Hootton ((17th century Quaker), Daniel Holt (18th century newspaper editor and supporter of Thomas Paine), Robin Hood, Alice Wheedon (Suffragette). You get the picture. Further suggestions are welcome. The people in the book don't need to be "big names" and could be rebels in their own field. Suggestions welcome, here or to info(at)fiveleaves.co.uk.

Battle of Cable Street, diary date

If you had planned to take part in the Battle of Cable Street, you are, unfortunately, 73 years and 364 days late, as the 74th anniversary is tomorrow. However we can say that plans are already being worked up for the 75th anniversary in 2011. I posted about the books Five Leaves will be publishing earlier, on 13th August, but can now say that we'll be running a joint launch for the books on 2nd October 2011, with a panel discussion on the literature of the 1930s the previous day. Alan Gibbons, author of one of the books, will also be doing some schools' work on the 3rd October. Many of the Cable Street events will take place in and around Wilton's Music Hall in the East End. Meantime you might want to diary that weekend, and read an interview with one of the participants, Max Levitas, still active at 95 or watch another, Ubby Cowan, talking about the event:
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/97180, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FuXR2wFHA0

Things to Say

I was going to do a posting about Monday night's launch event at Bookmarks Bookshop for John Lucas's two new books, but one of those present beat me to it. John Harvey, taking time off from his life of crime writing and listening to jazz, has posted: http://mellotone70up.wordpress.com/.

Anarchist Book Fair 2010

History Workshop has made it to the modern age, now supplementing the academic journal of the same name with a more accessible website, whose subtitle is "Doing progressive history in a digital age". The site is live but for the moment it looks like not a lot of history has happened. I think this will change. Meantime here's my article over there about the Anarchist Book Fair, this year's event having just taken place: http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/anarchist-bookfair/

First and last Beeston Int Poetry Festival ends

The Flying Goose in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, was packed and sweaty for the last reading of the small and unlikely Beeston International Po Fest. The event finished on home ground, with two Midlands writers reading, Matthew Welton and Roy Fisher. It was the perfect setting for two great poets, reading quietly and demanding attention. I only got a silver star for attending seven of the ten events. One Stakhanovite managed them all and has been awarded the gold star for services to poetry. The Flying Goose always has a high percentage of writers and organisers in the crowd, and some last minute networking means that there's be another regional independent publishers day event next March in Leicester, States of Independent II. There's a video archive of a poem from each of the Beeston readers on
http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129081423811358

Colin Ward, Education, Childhood and Environment

Advance warning of a day conference at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge on this subject. Colin's key books on this (alas not from Five Leaves, our books from him are on landscape) were The Child in the City and The Child in the Country. The conference organisers are looking for papers on anarchism and libertarian education; architecture, town planning and spaces for children; photography and images of children; the city as a curriculum resource; children's street cultures; play, education and urban contexts; children as citizens. Ken Worpole will be one of the speakers. The papers at the conference will contribute towards a special issue of the journal Childhood. For further information and to offer papers and articles, please contact Cathy Burke on Cb552@cam.ac.uk before the end of the year.

A Later Call

2013 will soon be upon us. Had he lived, the novelist Angus Wilson would be 100 in August of that year. Wilson's fiction was admired by a band of other writers including Paul Bailey, Ian McEwan and Rose Tremain. His book Anglo-Saxon Attitudes was the big British novel of 1956, and serialised on television by Andrew Davies (who has the franchise for televised literary works), though people say Wilson's best book may have been Late Call. Margaret Drabble did a big posthumous biography of Angus Wilson, but his star has gradually faded while other writers of his period - Iris Murdoch and William Golding for example have not. Ever willing to take on a challenge, Five Leaves is planning a critical book on Wilson for publication in 2013 (don't rush your orders just yet) and after meeting the author Paul Binding tonight we have a title, A Later Call, which somehow seems rather apt.

It also seems apt to illustrate this posting with an old photograph of Wilson out campaigning for Public Lending Right for authors, given that our government has just announced the closure of the well-respected quango, the PLR Agency.