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. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. Jun 24

    THE ASSET CLASS: Hettie O'Brien w/ Dan Hecox

    ‘PART WAKE-UP CALL, PART FINANCIAL THRILLER’ (SHAMI CHAKRABARTI) The Asset Class is an equal parts thrilling and enraging work of vital financial journalism, lifting the lid on the relentlessly destructive force of private equity. We are thrilled to welcome the book’s author Hettie O’Brien to Housmans to be interviewed about the book by celebrated journalist Dan Hancox.A thrilling, eye-opening investigation into private equity, a secretive wing of the finance industry that is so relentlessly destructive, it could have been created to undermine our way of life. You don’t know their names, but they own the house you rent. They own your hospitals, nurseries and care homes, the media you consume and the companies you work for. They even own the tools your union uses to fight back. Business is a contest – and they say their people are built to win. But when does competition become a struggle to the death? For decades, private equity firms have infiltrated every corner of modern life. Wielding debt as a weapon, they push vital services into crisis. Their cover story: that this is merely the ‘creative destruction’ essential to growth. Old-school capitalists say they’re dismantling everything that made our economies work.In The Asset Class, reporter Hettie O’Brien penetrates a hidden empire of billion-dollar deals and covert financial warfare. From Copenhagen to San Francisco, Barcelona to the Yorkshire Dales, she follows the money, the ideological roots and the trail of destruction. What she finds is chilling: private equity isn’t just reshaping the economy – it’s selling out the foundations of Western society. The new owners think they can hide in the shadows. But the owned are fighting back.Hettie will be interviewed by Dan Hancox, Guardian journalist and author of Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World (Verso, 2024). They will talk about the book for about 45 minutes followed by a q&a.

  6. Jun 10

    TWENTY-ONE YEARS, FOUR MONTHS: The Journal of a Kurdish Political Prisoner

    Please note that this talk was delivered with the assistance of a translator. Join for a discussion of the journal of Kurdish revolutionary, Ali Poyraz. He spent twenty-one years and four months in Turkish prisons. He was born in 1962 in Bozüyük, an Alevi village in the Gürün district of Sivas. According to Yeni Özgür Politika, his political consciousness was shaped by his older brother, Hüseyin Poyraz (also known as Rubar Dicle), a member of the PKK Central Committee. In 1981, Ali was captured by Turkish authorities in a rural area of Pazarcık while serving as a PKK cadre. Tried by a military court, he was sentenced to death. Although the Turkish Supreme Court upheld the sentence, it was later commuted to twenty-one years and four months of imprisonment following the abolition of the death penalty in Turkey under Prime Minister Turgut Özal.Ali’s journal records his thoughts and observations, providing invaluable insight into life inside Turkish prisons, including the organisation, morale, and activities of political prisoners. His journal is a mine of information that lends itself to much probing and understanding of the conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK over the past 45 years. This book is published for scholarly purposes, following the recent disbandment of the PKK as an armed force, and the changing political landscape in Turkey today.We will discuss this powerful and important book, followed by a wider discussion of political imprisonment more generally.This event will be chaired by Dr Becka Hudson is a postdoctoral researcher at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research looks at the interaction between imprisonment, mental health diagnosis and colonial domination. She also has 15+ years experience working in campaigns, for struggles against criminalisation, housing injustice and state racism.

  7. May 27

    LECTURE: Laurence Housman and the Women’s Suffrage Movement

    Learn about Housmans’ namesake and his efforts to fight for women’s suffrage. This free talk is in collaboration UCL, who hold the Laurence Housman archive. Personal items of Housman’s taken from the archive will be on display.This public lecture will explore Housmans Bookshop namesake Laurence Housman (1865-1958) and his active role in the women’s suffrage movement. It will shed new light on UCL’s Laurence Housman Collection by discussing how Housman’s sociopolitical values emerged during the Victorian period as he developed an artistic practice as an Aesthetic and Decadent illustrator. Housman was also a writer who would go on to contribute to Votes for Women (1908-18), a suffrage newspaper edited by Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence. He would later collaborate with his sister, the engraver Clemence Housman, to found the Suffrage Atelier, an artists’ collective. Using illustration as a form of social and political resistance, Housman designed An Anti-Suffrage Alphabet (1911), a work that featured many women artists who would go on to forge professional careers, including Pamela Colman Smith.Dr Michelle Reynolds is a researcher in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and visual culture. Her PhD thesis, which she completed at the University of Exeter, considered the professionalisation of women illustrators and cartoonists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and their relationship to the socio-political and cultural phenomenon of the New Woman. Her research interests include women artists and designers, illustration and book studies, gender and sexuality, reform movements, dress histories, and graphic satire.

  8. May 13

    Police the Beats: Lambros Fatsis w/ Adèle Oliver

    We are absolutely delighted to welcome Lambros Fatsis to Housmans to discuss the criminalizing of black culture, music and youth. We are thrilled also to welcome back the brilliant Adèle Oliver, author of ‘Deeping it: Colonialism, Culture and Criminalisation of UK Drill’, to interview Lambros about his work.Policing The Beats is a bold analysis that exposes the racist policing of Black music. The emergence of UK drill music made headline news, portraying it as a criminal enterprise instead of recognising it as an art form. This new rap subgenre, however, is neither the first nor the only Black music to be targeted this way.Policing the beats rewinds the tape to demonstrate how music has been used as an instrument for policing Black people, from the era of colonial slavery to the present day, revealing the racist legal processes that make crimes out of rhymes.This original and readable book offers the first in-depth account of the policing of Black music in Britain, highlighting the relationship between politics, culture and criminal (in)justice and inviting music lovers, scholars and activists to tune in.

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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
    28
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Housmans Bookshop
  • Show Website
    Housmans Bookshop

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