Culture

Regular readers of this page will know that the Cynefin Y Werin network is pursuing a major project to establish a Peace Institute (Academi Heddwch), working with academics and others in Wales. The Peace Institute is likely to be based on the model of the Flemish Peace Institute. Delegates from Cynefin Y Werin have visited Brussels and speakers from the institute undertook a speaking tour of Wales. The Wales project has the rhetorical support of the Welsh Assembly government but the…

As a child William Morris lived near Epping Forest, a place he would later describe as “always interesting and always beautiful”.

Kathy Haslam, curator of Blackwell and co-curator of this exhibition with Helen Elletson, curator of Kelmscott House, sees Morris’s sense of place as a thread running through his life and work. The exhibition tries to show how important place was to him. It looks at the successive places where he lived and worked and shows the logical development from his…

Henry Morton Stanley’s popular fame is based on the words which he claims to have uttered on finding the long-lost explorer: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume”. As with much of what Stanley wrote, the veracity of this claim is questionable.

For five years Stanley was king Leopold II of Belgium’s main man in the Congo. The colonisation, pillaging of ivory and rubber, atrocities and genocide under Leopold amount to Africa’s “hidden holocaust” (see King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild…

If you could choose any of the characters from your childhood reading, who would you invite to help you spark a revolution? James Bond? Harry Potter? Badger from The Wind and the Willows?

If you’re the central character in Paco Igancio Taibo’s tricksy novella – one of PM Press’s new “Found in Translation” series – you choose Sherlock Holmes, Doc Holliday, D’Artagnan, Dick Turpin, the Light Brigade, and then throw in some Mau Mau fighters for good measure.

Set in the wake of the…

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I stand for life against death. I stand for peace against war! – Pablo Picasso

“Picasso Peace and Freedom” at the Tate Liverpool looks at Picasso’s work between 1944, when he joined the French Communist Party, and his death in 1973. It shows him as an artist who recorded the brutality of war and worked through his art, and in his life, for peace.

The exhibition, curated by Lynda Morris of Norwich University College of the Arts and Christoph Gruneberg, director of Tate Liverpool…

Much of our understanding of the world and its peoples is based on sometimes unconsciously- absorbed accounts of history.

When Martin Bernal first published Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987, he set out to show the impact Egyptians and other dark-skinned peoples had on Greek civilization, a history he argued had been covered up by classics scholars for largely racist reasons. Understandably, the academic community launched intense…

Are you looking for out-of-print books relating to the peace movement? If so send your wants list to Housmans Bookshop (5 Caledonian Road, Kings Cross, London N1 9DX) or email mo@housmans.com

Oxford University Press have just published a massive four volume International Encyclopaedia of Peace.

Below you can see one of the co-editors of the encyclopedia, Peter van den Dungen, in conversation with contributor Hisashi Nakamura of York…

This column purports to be a review of PVT West’s poetry but it requires confession. Pat was a friend and poet/performer with whom I worked from time to time for over 30 years. Take this into account.

When Pat died I wrote of her here. Two years on, a new book of her poems has, to my chagrin, made me realise I hadn’t appreciated how significant she was – and is. I knew she felt under-valued and I realise that I under-valued her too.

In her beautiful poem, “Lament”,…

Espousing participatory democracy and direct action, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the iconic American New Left group of the early 1960s, played a key role in organising the first major demonstration against the Vietnam War in 1965.

Recognising that it was necessary to change the political and economic systems in order to stop “the seventh war from now”, it tried and failed to organise an “interracial movement of the poor” before disintegrating, destroyed by various Marxist…

Edinburgh’s first “Celebrating Cultures of Resistance” all-day film festival took place on 20 March at the Banshee Labyrinth, a unique venue near the Royal Mile. Organised by the local Anarchist Federation group and supported by AK Press and the local Solidarity with the Serbian 6 campaign, the event was a big success.

And this despite an error on the publicity that listed the starting time an hour too early! Organisers met would-be filmgoers outside the venue and had to ask them to…

Nelly Maes, president of the Flemish Peace Institute, spoke at the David Davies Memorial Institute (DDMI) in Aberystwyth on 24 February to an audience of students and local people.

Her talk was part of a visit to Wales in support of calls for a Wales Peace Institute. On 23 February, Maes and Tomas Baum, director of the Flemish Peace Institute, gave evidence to the national assembly in support of a 1,500 name petition urging the creation of such an institute.

In…

At the end of this powerful retrospective of the work of photojournalist Don McCullin, there is space for visitors to question the photographer. I wrote “How could you experience this, and not become active in opposing war?”

The photographs, mostly in his stark black-and-white style, many the subject of awards, are well-known and need few words.

If nothing else in the Imperial War Museum can persuade you of the unbearable realities of war, McCullin’s photographs surely must.…

The greatest pleasure in writing for PN has always been that its editors let me write about whatever catches my fancy. And my fancy is to write about anything I fancy will interest PN readers.

However, my piece on cowardice and bravery is currently on PN’s website and exemplifies how the net has changed my notion of “PN readers”. I used to regard them as comrades-in-(harmless)-arms; now they could just be serendipitous surfers.

It’s too late to change my writing…

Other people go to Glastonbury; I go to Raise Your Banners. Instead of going to Glastonbury, and spending lots of money and seeing a CND stall on the side, I go to support a festival of political song.

There are sort of two parts to the festival. There are a number of political choirs, so in one part of the festival there’s a showcase for them, and so there was the London Socialist Choir, and Red & Green, and then all the northern choirs.

This year the festival was in…