Housmans Bookshop

Housmans Bookshop
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Housmans Bookshop is a left wing radical bookshop in London since 1945. We frequently host fascinating authors, speakers, and other guests to talk about their work. For your listening pleasure, these events are recorded and uploaded here so that you too can enjoy our speakers even if you're unable to make it to the bookshop!

  1. 2d ago

    ZACK POLANSKI: Green Socialist? Russell Warfield in conversation w/ Jonas Patrick Marvin

    To help celebrate the launch of Russell Warfield‘s excellent new book The Green Socialist: Zack Polanski and the Battle for Britain’s Future (Pluto, 2026) we invite into a good natured debate with fellow socialist writer Jonas Patrick Marvin, regular contributor to Salvage and author of The Breaking of the English Working Class (Verso, 2026).In The Green Socialist, Russel argues that the election of Zack Polanski to the leadership of the Green Party of England and Wales caused a political earthquake. While Labour haemorrhages support, the far-right rises and a new anti-capitalist party struggles to be born, Polanski has seized the initiative, resulting in record-breaking membership numbers and polling for the Greens. How did Polanski end up being propelled to power on an unprecedented mandate within the membership of the Green Party? And what can he achieve from this position? The Green Socialist takes a look at the Greens through the lens of its tensions, limitations and contradictions, demonstrating that Polanski is the natural culmination of the party’s story so far, and how it can provide a vehicle for a transformational politics capable of defeating the far-right and building a better Britain.Our Speakers:Russell Warfield is a communications strategist, working across climate campaigning, politics and the third sector for over a decade. He has been a contributing editor at Resurgence and Ecologist, and his writing has appeared in New Statesman, New Internationalist and Byline Times. You can find him @russellwarfield on Twitter/X and @rmwarfield on Instagram!Jonas Patrick Marvin is a writer, researcher and campaigner based in Stoke-on-Trent. He regularly contributes to Salvage and Novara Media and is a host of the popular podcast Life of the Party.

  2. Oct 14

    CHARITY SHOP WORLD! with Tansy E. Hoskins

    WE ARE DELIGHTED TO WELCOME TANSY E. HOSKINS TO HOUMANS TO TALK ABOUT HER GROUNDBREAKING, MOVING NEW STUDY OF CHARITY SHOPS AND THE ROLES THEY PLAY IN MODERN CONSUMERIST CULTURE.‘Charity shops are ubiquitous and invisible. They anchor the high street, employ thousands, process millions of items. Yet far more is written about AI than this staple of 21st century Britain. Thank goodness, then, for Tansy Hoskins, who deftly shows how the charity shop is both an escape from consumerism and an essential part of global capitalism. This is a rich and surprising book, which takes you both to Accrington and Bangladesh, providing financial expose as well as character studies.’— Aditya Chakrabortty, Senior Economics Commentator, The GuardianHave you ever wondered what happens to the contents of the bags you drop off at the charity shop? With over 80 billion pieces of clothing produced each year and with human made stuff now outweighing living biomass, this is the story of the first sorting site for the deluge of items we discard every single day. Having spent decades exploring charity shops for bargains and treasure, Tansy Hoskins decided to dig deep into the world of charity shop volunteering. From used underwear to wolf pelts, Charity Shop World is a personal account of sorting through donations to reveal the entanglement of people and products. This book also investigates the export of clothes to overseas markets and landfill, revealing hidden shareholders behind a multi-million pound business.Taking us to the heart of a country hit by austerity and the cost of living crisis, Charity Shop World reveals surprising places of human connectivity, where local communities struggle to find their way through economic hardship to reach a more sustainable way of living.In a world where ‘broken’ things and ‘unwanted’ people are expelled to the margins of society, this book is a powerful call for a new way of living to rise up from the debris of overproduction and consumption.‘A story of what happens to the leftovers of capitalism. Within the places of possibility, persistence and promise there is hope. Beautifully told, carefully bundled, expertly delivered. Tansy Hoskins’ Charity Shop World is a page turner.’— Danny Dorling, author of The Next Crisis: What We Think About the Future‘What might fashion design look like as a public resource based on community and cooperation? Charity Shop World answers that question by reconnecting us to the humanity underpinning every aspect of fashion, everything that Big Fashion, as Tansy calls it- chooses to ignore and exploit. Tansy’s sensitive and warm account of working in a charity shop offers a microcosm of what’s best and what’s worst in today’s fashion system and reveals how another fashion world is possible. Fashion designers, students and educators need to centre the end of life of garments from the very start of the design process and critically address waste colonialism in fashion – Charity Shop World should be on all fashion reading lists. Tansy asks us to reflect on, ‘What do we truly need?’; it’s time for Big Fashion to answer that same question for the future of our people, species and planet.’—Tanveer Ahmed, Senior Lecturer in Fashion and Race, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London

  3. Sep 23

    Liquid Reflections with Liliane Lijn

    Liliane Lijn is an artist who needs little introduction. Her stirring, often ostentatious and always poetic works are dotted throughout the British urban landscape, and overseas. Regular visitors to Housmans will have no doubt seen her recent piece Temenos just up the road from us, near Granary Square.We will host Liliane September 4th to launch the paperback edition of her brilliant bildungsroman Liquid Reflections. The book begins in 1958 with the talented and fearless Liliane Lijn leaving her family home and moving to Paris alone to become an artist. Once there, she found an art world filled with the wild energy of creative revolution – peopled and controlled almost entirely by men. In the years that followed, Lijn built a life for herself in the city. She embraced the hectic bohemian spirit of the Left Bank. She befriended artists, painters, poets, gallerists and revolutionaries, as the late Surrealists gave way to a burgeoning Pop Art movement. She had disastrous love affairs with difficult men. She experimented boldly, creating ground-breaking sculptures with light, text and movement. And as her profile steadily grew, she was told again and again that there are no great women artists: ‘There never have been.’Liquid Reflections is her memoir of these years of experiment and adventure – years when Lijn was constantly in motion, from Paris to New York to Venice to Athens, from paper and canvas to wax and Perspex to oil and water. In love, she became pregnant but rebelled against the idea that a woman could not be both a great artist and a mother. And she sought – and found – radical pleasure in the act of creative expression and in the living, sensuous world around her.Based on personal diaries from the time, this is a riveting and revelatory account of a singular coming of age: a glittering portrait of the artist as a young woman.‘I wrote LIQUID REFLECTIONS because I wanted to take my readers on the journey I made to become an artist. It’s the story of an idealistic, inspired young woman who refuses to accept the prejudices of her time. Becoming an artist was also a search for my own identity…’ — Liliane LijnLiliane will be conversation with the art writer Jennifer Higgie, author of numerous books, her most recent being The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World, the first major work of art history to focus on women artists and their engagement with the spirit world.

  4. Sep 9

    POETRY SPECIAL: Robert Glück reads at Housmans

    Housmans are beyond honoured, and slightly delightedly flabbergasted, to welcome the legendary writer Robert Glück to the shop for a reading. Robert, or Bob, is one of the most important writers working in the world today, in a career that spans many decades, poetry and cutting edge fiction; his work has been of profound importance to the contemporary queer literary landscape.

  5. Aug 5

    International Freak: ROBIN FARQUHARSON by M. Syd Rosen w/ Owen Hatherly

    M. SYD ROSEN AND OWEN HATHERLEY DISCUSS THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF COUNTERCULTURAL ICON ROBIN FARQUHARSON‘Rosen is an intergenerational talent. That is, he seems to move effortlessly across decades, from dark matter to illumination; gleaning, recovering, challenging, making new.’Iain SinclairBorn in 1930 into a privileged South African family, Robin Farquharson was part of a new wave of intellectuals tasked with reimagining society in the wake of World War II—until a phone call from God brought everything crashing down.Under the gaze of the secret police and his own mounting paranoia, Farquharson fled to Swinging London and tried to reinvent himself as a countercultural guru. Along the way, he helped to have South Africa banned from the Olympic Games, authored an unclassifiable memoir of queer street life, and climbed to the top of the mysterious White Panther Party. Then, just days after founding the pioneering Mental Patients Union, flames ripped through his home and Farquharson was gone.Drawing on meticulous archival research and extensive new interviews, International Freak marshals an extraordinary cast of characters in order to tell Farquharson’s story for the first time. Equal parts experimental biography, social history, and psychedelic true crime, this is a portrait of a singular man and the world he sought desperately to transform.

  6. Jul 22

    Book Launch: Turning Away by Benjamin A. Saltzman w/ Revd Dr Ayla Lepine

    A sweeping account of how we are at our most human when we turn away from the pains of the world. This is a work of breathtaking scholarship. We are delighted to welcome its author, Benjamin A Saltzman, to Housmans for its UK launch. He will be in conversation with Revd Dr Ayla Lepine.Why do we look away from the suffering of others? Why do we cover our faces in shame? Why do we lower our heads in grief? Few gestures are as universal as the averted gaze. Fewer still are as ambivalent and inscrutable. In this incisive study, Benjamin A. Saltzman reveals how the kaleidoscopic appearance of these gestures in art, poetry, and philosophy has turned them into an essential language for our uncomfortable engagements with the world, challenging us to reflect on the ways we fundamentally relate to others.Into the horizon of contemporary discourse, Turning Away sets out from five influential scenes in which figures avert their gaze: Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Christ’s Crucifixion, and the Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve. The gestures of aversion in these scenes refract across visual media, through philosophy and politics, into modernity and the present day, having been reimagined along the way by thinkers like Hannah Arendt, artists like Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí, poets like Langston Hughes, and many others. Saltzman offers a timely critique of the privilege of turning away and of the too-easy condemnation of our tendencies to do so.

  7. Jul 8

    Privatising Humanity by Kate Bayliss w/ Adrienne Buller

    Kate Bayliss in conversation with Adrienne BullerPRIVATISING HUMANITY is a powerful exposé of how finance turns our basic human needs into assets.We have entered a new era of turbo-charged financial extraction. Having amassed huge reserves, global finance capital is seeking out fresh areas for profitable investments. Virtually all aspects of our lives are now targeted by someone seeking to make a profit.Kate Bayliss shows how wealthy investors, including asset managers, target our essential services. When it comes to investments in these sectors, shareholder profits are funded by us, the end-users and tax-payers who simply wish to meet our basic human needs for water, warmth and shelter. We have no alternative but to pay into these structures that often generate massive returns for investors and dysfunctional systems for society.Unpacking the details of these processes in three sectors in the UK – water, energy and housing – Bayliss exposes the harmful consequences of this model, which is contributing to deepening inequality.Kate will be joined in conversation by Adrienne Buller, author of The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism.

  8. Jul 8

    The Plot Is On Fire: Manuela Zechner w/ Max Haiven

    We are delighted to welcome Manuela Zechner to Housmans to talk about her truly original and radical work in postcolonial eco-theory.As myths of progress and modernisation collapse in the relentless polycrisis of our time, how do we strengthen other plots—in community, practice and struggle? How do we come together as movements for earthcare?The Plot is on Fire: Care Struggles after Progress, Plantation and Patriarchy weaves stories, proposals, and analyses around a key domain of living reproduction in crisis: agriculture. Looking at peasant, indigenous, and transecofeminist practices, it formulates another plot on how we want to sustain life collectively—beyond progress, plantation, and patriarchy.Recovering and repurposing old and new technologies, and breaking down the division between rural and urban, the ground is made fertile for growing other futures. Alongside writers like Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, this work of radical political theory raises critical questions about technology and storytelling, as matters of care and community.Manuela will be in conversation with Max Haiven author of Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (Pluto). They will talk for around 45 minutes to an hour followed by a discussion with the audience.

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About

Housmans Bookshop is a left wing radical bookshop in London since 1945. We frequently host fascinating authors, speakers, and other guests to talk about their work. For your listening pleasure, these events are recorded and uploaded here so that you too can enjoy our speakers even if you're unable to make it to the bookshop!

Information

  • Creator
    Housmans Bookshop
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    32
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Housmans Bookshop
  • Show Website
    Housmans Bookshop

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