I am
currently working on a review of Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside
Down. Although the conference to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the
publication of the book has been moved to February, it still gives me some more
time to work on this review and other work by Hill.
While there
is a backlog of books I need to review, I will have to concentrate on some
articles on the latest developments at Royal Mail. Management is hell-bent on
destroying the pay conditions of thousands of postal workers and turning the
company into an Amazon-style business with all that entails for the workforce,
i.e. job cuts and redundancies. With Thirty thousand postal workers having
already applied for early retirement, with more on the way, the CWU bureaucracy
seems hell-bent on some shabby deal rather than mobilise postal workers against
these attacks. Time for some independent rank-and-file committees to be
established.
Early next
year, I need to start some work on Stuart Hall. His Selected Writings on
Marxism were published in 2021, and work on him is long overdue. When I did the
first year of a pre-masters degree at Birkbeck, I researched him and his
sidekick Raphael Samuel. Returning to the Bishopsgate Institute, where the
Samuel archive is held, is a must.
I am near the
end of Blake Bailey's biography of Phillip Roth. It is a superb read, and at
over 900 pages long, it feels like I have lived with Roth all my life. Not sure
I will review quite yet, and maybe do a bit more reading.
Given that
most of the advertisements for my website go through Twitter, thanks to the
megalomaniac Adolf Musk, I will have to look elsewhere to publicise the website
and blog.
Meetings
On Monday, 21
November 2022, Elliot Vernon will talk on "The Wall and Glory of
Jerusalem": The message of sermons preached before the Lord Mayor and the City
of London in the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649-1660. Part of Britain in
Revolution series from Oxford University.
Christopher
Hill and the English Revolution: 50 years after TWTUD- Sat, 4 February 2023, 09:30 – 17:00
GMT- Institute of
Historical Research (IHR), School of Advanced Study Senate House Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU
