VIJAY PRASHAD examines why in 2018 Washington started to take an increasingly belligerent stance towards ‘near peer rivals’ – Russa and China – with far-reaching geopolitical effects
On the socially transformative roles of the bicycle and holiday camp
MAT COWARD looks at how the bicycle helped spread socialist education and the holiday camp was invented for the benefit of the working class
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KIRKPATRICK MACMILLAN is not a firm of City accountants, but something much better: the “inventor” of the bicycle.
(Inventor has to go in inverted commas, because so many people are credited with inventing various versions of what became the bicycle. Macmillan is widely held to be the man who made the key breakthrough of adding pedals).
But this week’s column is really about how socialists came to invent the holiday camp.
More from this author
MAT COWARD battles wayward pigeons in pursuit of a crop of purple sprouting broccoli
Despite his wealthy background and membership of a secretive aristocratic occult club, the radical politician forged an alliance with the working class to fight for democracy and free speech against the Georgian elite, writes MAT COWARD
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MAT COWARD offers a roll call of refuseniks – some for political reasons, others for quirky reasons of their own
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Charles Dickens was facing a return to the destitution that had blighted his childhood, and it was this which drove him to write the remarkable best-seller which changed the politics of Christmas forever, writes MAT COWARD
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MAT COWARD traces how ill health and voracious reading transformed a military man into the Father of Reform, championing American independence, universal suffrage and secret ballots against Establishment resistance
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MAT COWARD unearths Gustav Holst’s radical roots, from meetings at William Morris’s house to pamphlet-printing and agitation with the Red Vicar of Thaxted — and laments that he is remembered today for the entirely wrong reason
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MAT COWARD resurrects the radical spirit of early Labour’s overlooked matriarch, whose tireless activism and financial support laid the foundations for the party’s early success