The past week has been both a sad and inspiring one for lovers of libraries. As I write, the occupation of Carnegie Library in London’s Herne Hill is in its fourth day. Last Thursday 31st March, some sixty local residents of all ages and walks of life made camp there in a last-ditch attempt to […]
With National Libraries Day and the Speak Up For Libraries parliamentary lobbying day upon us again, I’ve been thinking about a little-recognised aspect of public libraries and what they do for us, in housing resources that contribute to our sense of place. Google ‘library’ and ‘local studies’ or ‘local history’, and you’re likely to find […]
As 2016 gets underway, I’m beginning a three-year term on the management committee for the Society of Authors, the trade union for UK writers. The SoA has kicked off the new year with an open letter to publishers, part of an international campaign calling for fairer terms for authors. It’s a response to the under-recognised […]
In my exploration of religious dissent in The Secret Life of God, I conclude that nonconformity – once such a force for change in British society – has lost much of the muscle that comes from swimming against the tide. But there’s one area in which these latter-day dissenters have shown me the way. Attending, […]
In my third and final blog on public libraries before the election, I want to deal with an obvious yet overlooked aspect of the library and why we still need it: Libraries are places, housing physical books and sheltering people of flesh and blood. It is this truth, until recently accepted as an unquestionable good, that […]
The measure of a society is how it treats its libraries. ‘It just strikes me as something a nation can boast about – we lend people books for free,’ says James Brown in a swelte little anthology I’ve been reading called The Library Book, borrowed from my local, threatened Upper Norwood Library. Library services have […]
The past is closer than we think. It’s easy to forget that public libraries haven’t been around that long. The Public Libraries Act of 1850 gave councils the right to establish free libraries in their areas. But many obstacles had to be overcome before the legislation of 1964 imposed on councils a statutory obligation to […]
It’s Christmas. It’s also, as is often remarked, a festival of other ‘c’ words such as consumerism and consumption. It’s what happens when capitalism meets the need, which has probably existed as long as human societies, for bit of a midwinter party, a distraction from the cold and the dark. It’s a time when the […]
2014 brings the centenary of the start of World War One, and the beginning of four years of national commemorations. It’s telling that, in writing that sentence, I nearly typed ‘celebrations’ instead of ‘commemorations’. For the official discourse about the war has a triumphalist tone, one which perfectly expresses a nationalist narrative about the greatness […]