Frank O’Hara insisted that poetry should be ‘between two persons instead of two pages’. The enduring friendship between Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara reveals the ways in which it was possible to resist the post-war ideals of uncompromising heterosexual masculinity and the nuclear family.
Four years on from the Brexit Referendum, Christopher Kissane reflects on the Brexiteers’ abuses of history, and the challenges facing radical historians.
The sixteenth-century struggle to balance biological and economic well-being implicated a surprising number of authorities, but not everyone accepted their discipline. Matthew Vester explores in Pandemic Politics During the Renaissance.
There are many stories of friendship during the miners’ strike. The importance of this was in part the sense – in the middle of extraordinary hostility from multiple directions – that they weren’t alone. One Cannock miner talked about the support from London printworkers: ‘although the money aid is crucial to our cause, the feelings of warmth and friendship and solidarity with which they bring with them gives us heart to carry on the fight.’ The long-term, mutual and egalitarian relationships signalled by the word ‘friendship’ during the miners’ strike should be embedded in our organising, anticipating the type of world we want to make.
How did Atlantic slavery end? Diana Paton argues that erasing the Haitian Revolution preserves the fiction that Britain is and was a progressive outlier in relation to race and racism
The last fortnight has seen many statues associated with racism and colonialism torn down. When were they originally put up, and what can that tell about the history of whiteness and empire? Peter Hill explores.
‘It began with an email of simple praise. A senior scholar reached out to me about my academic writing. Her words were hospitable and soft; and, I responded. Now, almost a year later, we continue to write…’ Celeste Henery on the radical importance of friendship for Black women writers and scholars.
