Radical Reads 2024

At History Workshop we are continuing our annual tradition of sharing books, podcasts and articles which have inspired, emboldened, and comforted us over the past twelve months.  As 2024 draws to a close, it is difficult to predict what another tumultuous year might bring. The need for imagination and radical hope feels more important than ever before and is poignantly reflected in this list of ‘Radical Reads’ chosen by our editors.

Mark Pendleton

Activism at its best is about love. And no activist movement has embodied this more than the struggle against the indifference, greed and oppression that was characteristic of many state and societal responses to HIV and AIDS, particularly in the US. In her stunning new memoir, Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art (2024), Okinawan-American writer Keiko Lane weaves her personal history of queer activism in Los Angeles and beyond with the stories of those she loved and organised with along the way into a profoundly political and deeply emotional text. Blood Loss also speaks to memory and storytelling and art and what may be unspoken but is carried in breath and blood and bones. There have been plenty of words written about HIV and AIDS and the collective responses to the devastation wreaked, particularly in queer communities, but none are more powerful than what Lane has produced in this brutally open and devastatingly loving memoir. Read it and rage. Mourn the dead. Love expansively. And continue to fight. Because there is no alternative.

Mary Newman

In the midst of a stressful year involving finishing a PhD and trying to find employment in academia, fibre arts have become an increasingly important place of rest and escape for me. I really enjoy taking refuge in a craft with such a long heritage in terms of women’s work, artistry and resistance. I’ve been reading Rozsika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1984) to try and understand how my little attempts at crochet and cross stitch fit into the ancient and radical historical legacy of embroidery.

Andrew Whitehead

My first radical read is Mishal Husain’s Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence (2024). The broadcaster Mishal Husain wrote this family memoir for her sons – a moving account of how her South Asian grandparents met and married, and how their lives were turned upside down by the Partition which accompanied the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. The writing is graceful and the story gripping, and Husain has managed to convey to a non-specialist audience the personal aspect, the tenderness and the tragedy, of one of the most tumultuous moments of the last century. Let’s hope that Husain’s appearance on ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ which surely must be on its way is as powerful and illuminating as this book.

My second radical read is Hugh Flouch’s Abyssinia: Hornsey’s Lost Village (2024). Local history at its best, a rigorously researched, well told and wonderfully illustrated account of a pocket of working-class housing amid the comfortable streets of suburban north London. The Abyssinia area stood for a century but was swept away completely in the 1960s; Hornsey School for Girls now stands on the site. Hugh Flouch tells the story of the building of the locality, the people who lived in these six streets, the institutions that helped sustain the community, and the pub (with a signboard featuring the racing tipster Prince Monolulu) which is the most remembered aspect of the district. I should declare an interest. I’m a member of the publications committee of Hornsey Historical Society – but trust me, this is a good one.

Charles West

Late to the party, but I’ve been reading David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) a couple of years after everyone else. It’s an exploration of how a particular vision of remote pre-history, devised in the 18th and 19th centuries, shaped and constrained the political imaginary, and still does. I imagine experts will quibble at the details for their particular specialisms (I am not at all convinced by the presentation of European Middle Ages as basically unbothered by hierarchy and inequality: what about ‘When Adam delved and Eve span’, and all that?) but this is a big-picture book, and it’s fascinating despite its flaws.

Marybeth Hamilton

My top radical read of the year, without question, is Dr Thomas Garland and the Dream Life of Factory Girls, an insightful and moving essay by Sally Alexander. The article – History Workshop’s first-ever Long Read – takes a deep dive into an obscure and utterly remarkable document, a 1938 Master’s thesis on anxiety amongst female factory labourers by Dr Thomas Garland. Garland was a Communist Party member and newly qualified doctor with no experience of factory work who became a medical officer at the Carreras Cigarette Factory in North London and set about assessing the lives of the young women in his care. With extraordinary compassion and sensitivity, he explored the physical and psychological strain the work exacted on young women and girls who were often their family’s sole financial support, documenting every facet of their lives, from their gruelling commutes (the photographs of crowds of young women waiting to pile onto already-jammed streetcars will strike a wearily familiar note to many present-day Londoners) to their fraught and often heart-breaking dreams. Sally Alexander’s rich and riveting analysis brings the document unforgettably to life.

I also absolutely loved Now Here, a BBC Sounds feature by the audio producer May Robson.  Over six episodes, it explores the radical history and contested future of common spaces across the UK, from a community-owned island in Scotland to a queer pub in the East End of London, all fighting back against neighbourhood decline and neglect. You can hear an interview with May Robson, and an excerpt from the feature, on an episode of the History Workshop podcast. As her account of its creation makes clear, the series set out to spotlight the lives of men and women animated by traditions of radical struggle. What results is stirring, inspiring, and full of hope.

Sally Alexander

Robert Icke’s re-writing of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, directed by him – brilliantly staged and cast – is a radical take on the human drive for knowledge and the tragedies which follow. Relations of power are underpinned by family and erotic compulsion. Do we – should we – ever know the truth of who we are, where we are, or the direction in which we are going.

Vivien Chan

As we reach the end of 2024, another tumultuous year full of difficult questions, I find myself being drawn to books that slow me down and remind me about the power of intimacy and dreaming. Two books on my reading list over the holiday season have been waiting patiently on the bookshelf for me. The first is Lola Olufemi’s book Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (2021) – a beautiful book of writing experiments which invites invention and embracement of the otherwise. The book is an inspiring weaving of historical connection, fervent imagination and collective memory. The other is Fragility: To touch and be touched (2022) by Marlies De Munck and Pascal Gielen. A small but powerful book, which reflects on what it means to live, work, and make within the cultural sector in an age where we know the fragile state of hierarchies, knowledge, and ego. It comes with abstract illustrations of spiky vitrines and lacy molecules which capture the tactile and violent absurdity of evaluations, careers, competition and a culture of ‘do not touch’. Instead, they call for openness and compassion and striving for the things that move us deeply and unexpectedly.

Barbara Taylor

My radical read is Sheila Rowbotham’s Reasons to Rebel: My memories of the 1980s (2024). This fascinating book is the second of Rowbotham’s memoirs. The first, Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s, was published in 2021. Rowbotham is a pioneer of women’s history, author of a host of rich studies of women’s lives and feminist activism in Britain and many other parts of the world. She is anti-sectarian, internationalist, and has played an active part in political and economic struggles since the 1960s, including campaigns for equal pay, legal reform, nuclear disarmament, and for a sexuality that is freely chosen and joyfully lived (her outstanding biography of Edward Carpenter [2008] is a major contribution to this). Her reflections on the fractious historical relationship between socialism and feminism have been particularly influential.

Reasons to Rebel is a deeply personal journey through the radicalisms of the 1980s. In Thatcherite Britain ‘there were many reasons to rebel’. Repressive laws, growing poverty (especially among women and minoritised populations), violent misogyny, racism, homophobia – hard times. But Rowbotham is never one for despair. Embedded in a large network of fellow radicals, she joins with them in theorising and challenging the ‘ruthless global capitalism’ of the Thatcher-Regan era. Her account of the many fronts on which battles were fought is engrossing but what makes the book exceptional is the entwining of this history with her private struggles. Rebellion and romance can be difficult bedfellows. Rowbotham has never shied from sharing these difficulties with her readers, in poignant evocations of love found, and lost. Her pain reaches out to the reader, as does her courage. An unmissable read.

Joe Moran

This year, I enjoyed Thea Lenarduzzi’s Dandelions (2022) a memoir about four generations of her family’s life and their migrations between Italy and England. Alert to the frangibility of memory and to a life lost in translation, Lenarduzzi knows that she is telling ‘a kind of fiction implanted through decades of other people’s talk’. I also recommend the linguist Tony Crowley’s Liverpool: A Memoir of Words (2023) by turns a memoir ingeniously told in alphabetical order, a cultural history of my adoptive city and a study of the way that our use of words is always bound up with class and power. It contains the striking revelation that, when Crowley was a student at Oxford, one of his tutors declined to teach him because he couldn’t stand hearing his Liverpool-accented voice during tutorials.

Felix Driver

Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (2003) by Robert Bickers is an absorbing, beautifully written portrait of an ordinary life and brutal death of a working-class policeman in the international settlement in interwar Shanghai. If you want a model for how we can think about the history of empire, class, race, urban cosmopolitanism and life stories all at once, this is it. Bickers also has a gem of an essay in Alan Lester’s bracing new edited collection, The Truth about Empire (2024), reflecting on the foundational role of violence in Britain’s relationship with China through the prism of London’s imperial memorials. As China looms ever larger in western geopolitical thinking, it’s important for us all to ponder what we know, what we thought we knew and what we don’t yet know about the histories and geographies of British empire-making.

Rebecca Spang

My first radical read is Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Quiet Coup (2024).Baradaran’s earlier books (How the Other Half Banks and The Color of Money) brilliantly dissected the racial and class inequalities built into the American banking system. With this book, she casts a wider net to show how ‘the richest country in the world’ become one characterized by growing inequality and dysfunctional politics. We have many histories of the contemporary USA, but Baradaran’s is especially strong in tracing how lawyers, bankers, and policymakers collaborated to privatize gain while allowing all the risks to be carried by the public sector. Accessible, engaging, and angry.

Dylan Penningroth’s Before the Movement (2023) uses local archives to explore how Black Americans used law and legal systems in the era before the ‘Civil Rights Movement.’ Even as they were stripped of political and social rights in the aftermath of Reconstruction, Black Americans continued to make contracts and own property – establishing a private-law foundation for the civil-rights demands of later decades. Deeply, deeply researched and exquisitely well written, Before the Movement should be read by anyone interested in legal history, race, and/or the history of property relations.

Anna Davin

My radical read for 2024 is Hesba Fay Brinsmead’s Pastures of the Blue Crane (1965). An excellent Australian novel about young people, set in postwar Queensland.

Yasmin Khan

I much enjoyed reading Ruby Lal’s Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan (2024) which is a gripping narrative of Mughal life from the perspective of a royal woman. In twentieth-century history, I liked Imperial Heartland: Immigration, Working-class Culture and Everyday Tolerance, 1917–1947 (2023) by David Holland, for an unusual and distinctive take on inter-marriage and migration in pre-war Britain. And Preeti Dhillon’s book, The Shoulders We Stand On: How Black and Brown people fought for change in the United Kingdom (2023), is passionate and full of new research.

Elly Dezateux

My radical read is Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019). I loved this book. It is about history and storytelling, archives and speculation. A family makes the journey from New York to Arizona in a car with seven boxes of CDs, books, newspaper cuttings, and ephemera in the boot. The parents – both of whom work in sound – are grappling with the irreconcilability of their new projects, one on Apache histories, the other on unaccompanied children crossing the US-Mexico border today. Their young children – step siblings – listen to Lord of the Flies in the car, ask questions, and document their own experiences in the ambience of the family’s looming separation. The children’s speech and fiercely loving relationship to one another are acutely and tenderly captured.

Luiselli has previously written about her experiences as an interpreter for child migrants in Tell Me How It Ends (2017). But she does not try to directly capture the voices of the other group of children in this book who experience border-produced family separation. As the mother seeks their stories and contemplates the ethics of telling them, they remain out of reach. Instead, mother and son read a story, together and separately, which threads though the narrative and eventually converges with it, blurring fact and fiction. This poetic, painful book-within-a-book tells of seven children making a long, dangerous journey – herded by a people smuggler – to cross a border. It draws on literary journeys, from Cormac McCarthy to the thirteenth-century children’s crusades, as well as the author’s own intimate knowledge of the border crisis. In thinking with sound, family, and fiction, Lost Children Archive refracts histories and present-day realities that are often archivally out of reach, undocumented.