Marx Memorial Library events

Marx Memorial Library Events: Spring 2011


Growing up in the shadow of Rome: Marx's Materialism and the Ruins of Trier (Lecture) – Prof. Edith Hall
Monday 28th March
6.30pm £2.50/£1 (concessions)

Karl Marx's birthplace in Trier – home to the modern Marx Museum and Centre – is justly famous. But Karl was only 15 months old when his parents moved from that address to other premises in the city. In this paper, Professor Hall seeks to reconstruct Marx's formative experiences in Trier, a city steeped in the Classical past with its triumphant arch, roman baths and palace of the Emperor Constantine.

Marx was very much the child of the European Enlightenment and this talk emphasises his lifelong debt to his birthplace and its heritage derived from the Classical world

Professor Edith Hall holds a Research Chair at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is author of many books on Classical culture and history, including Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun and Theorising Performance.

Women of a Red Decade: Women writers of the Left in the 1930s (Lecture) – Prof. Mary Joannou
Monday 4th April
6.30pm £2.50/£1 (concessions)

Women writers of the left made an important contribution to the radical thinking of the day but the extent of their contribution has not been fully recognised. This lecture will discuss the achievement of some of the most politically committed authors whose work shaped and made a difference to the 'red decade'. These include Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Ellen Wilkinson, Virginia Woolf, Vera Brittain, Naomi Mitchison, and Nancy Cunard.

Mary Joannou is Professor of Literary History and Women's Writing at Anglia Ruskin University. Her research interests are the women's suffrage movement, the 1930s, and late Victorian and early twentieth–century writing. Her publications include Ladies, Please Don't Smash These Windows: Women's Writing, Feminism and Social Change 1918–1938 and Contemporary Women's Writing: From the Golden Notebook to the Color Purple.

Andrew Rothstein and the Crucible of British Communism (Lecture) – Dr. David Burke
Monday 11th April
6.30pm £2.50/£1 (concessions)

In the second part of his in–depth study of the Rothsteins, David Burke looks at the revolutionary career of Andrew Rothstein. Andrew enjoyed a long and colourful life as revolutionary, propagandist, academic and a seminal figure in the development of the Marx Memorial Library. He was a foundation member of the Communist Party in 1920, a member of the Executive and editor of the Sunday Worker.

He worked at the Marx–Lenin Institute in Moscow during the 1930s and was a world expert on Marxism. Indeed, few of his contemporary writers had such a rich and exacting understanding of the life and works of the founders of the Communist Movement.

As a prominent figure in the British Communist Party, he soon fell under scrutiny by the intelligence services and was one of the first victims of the Cold War, losing his job at the University of London.

Dr David Burke teaches at Cambridge University and is the Author of the highly acclaimed Spy Who Came in from the Co–op a biography of Melita Norwood the well known left wing and peace activist, who was a life long supporter of the Morning Star.

Che Guevara: Life and Legend (Lecture) – Lucia Álvarez de Toledo
Monday 18th April
6.30pm £2.50/£1 (concessions)

Che Guevara is a symbol of youthful protest in the West, a representative of Sixties counterculture and the face adorning the T–shirts of a million student radicals. But in the rest of the world he is something else: a charismatic revolutionary, who redrew the political map of Latin America and gave hope to those resisting colonialism everywhere.

In this lecture, Lucia Alvarez de Toledo follows Che's astonishing journey from his birth in Rosario to the heart of Castro's new Cuban government, and through to the unforgiving jungle that formed the backdrop to his doomed campaigns in the Congo and Bolivia. She shows how an idealistic medical student became an inspirational revolutionary leader whose words and actions sent shockwaves surging through an entire continent, and how he continues to inspire to this day.

Lucia Álvarez de Toledo was born in Buenos Aires and knew Che Guevara. She has worked as a journalist and as an interpreter with both the BBC and the United Nations; she has translated many works by and about Che Guevara into English, and is the author of The Story Che Guevara.

Exhibition: News International Wapping – 25 Years On
1st – 31st May 2011
(Closed for bank holidays but a special opening on Sunday 1st May 2011)
Opening Times: 11am – 5pm Monday – Friday

In January 1986 Rupert Murdoch moved The Times, Sunday Times, The Sun and News of the World to Wapping in London's Docklands. Over 5500 production and clerical workers were sacked overnight. The bitter struggle for their jobs and trade union rights lasted 13 brutal months

From Sunday 1st May for one month the multi–media exhibition will display dramatic images and accounts of the dispute and the challenges for print and media workers and all those concerned with democracy and the media.

Photographs and documents will be available for view online in the Printers' Collection Archive. The exhibition will also include selections from the work of the late Tony Hall and his Strike Graphics archive of cartoons, posters and drawings. Some items will be for sale.

The exhibition is organised by Unite the Union, National Union of Journalists, Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom and is to be hosted by the Marx Memorial Library.