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ANGUS REID urges us to understand the persecution of Jason Arday from a political and historical perspective, and to see the victim in human terms
Poetry Review: Hoyoot: Collected Poems And Songs by Tom Pickard
Pickard poems ‘with two fists clenched’ are an inspiration, finds DAVID JOHN DOUGLASS
Re-releases of the classics Gypsy Rhumba and Buena Vista Social Club, and a stunning album by Palestinian artist Faris Ishaq
Nothing, says ANDY HEDGECOCK, can rescue this undistinguished amalgam of ponderous melodrama and shallow philosophical speculation
JAMIE BRITTON invites readers to visit 3,500 locals as part of a marathon artistic pub crawl
JOHN GREEN welcomes a valuable and incisive analysis of a world become hyperpolitical but without the mass movement institutions to represent it
Tom Pickard is something of a legend in his own lifetime.
By the time he was 15 he was already head and shoulders in the van of the radical free-verse movement which swept into Tyneside’s beat, blues and jazz scene of the early 1960s.
Free verse found an unlikely home in the wild, emerging youth movement. It was centred on the anti-bomb struggles, direct action and anarchism and fused with the rhythm-and-blues bars and clubs now marching in time with Liverpool and other industrial cities.
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CARLOS MARTINEZ responds to liberal hawk Simon Tisdall’s evidence-free China-bashing and asks whose agenda it really serves
ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east
MARY CONWAY becomes impatient with the intellectual self-indulgence of Tom Stoppard in a production that is, nevertheless, total class
Although this production was in rehearsal before the playwright’s death, it allows us to pay homage to his life, suggests MARY CONWAY