Non-Fiction Books:

The Last English Revolutionary

Sorry, this product is not currently available to order

Here are some other products you might consider...

The Last English Revolutionary

Tom Wintringham, 1898-1949, Revised and Updated Edition
Click to share your rating 0 ratings (0.0/5.0 average) Thanks for your vote!

Format:

Paperback / softback
Unavailable
Sorry, this product is not currently available to order

Description

'Spain woke me up politically. I rediscovered democracy, the power that can come from people working together when a popular front is not just a manoeuvre but a reality.' Drawing on his political and fighting experience in the Spanish Civil War, Tom Wintringham wrote the best-seller New Ways of War: 'a do-it-yourself guide to killing people' but also a highly subversive call for a socialist revolution. He called for 'a People's war' and the phrase stuck. Recalling the English Civil war he likened the Home Guard he trained in guerrilla warfare to the New Model Army and later he helped found Common Wealth, a political party more radical in some ways than Labour. His finest hour was 1940 when he inspired his countrymen to resist invasion. After gaining exclusive access to the Wintringham archive, now in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, historian Hugh Purcell published a biography of this 'uniquely English revolutionary' (Sutton Publishing, 2004). Working with Phyll Smith, librarian in Wintringham's home town of Grimsby, they have since discovered a wealth of historical firsts, including: the actual leaflet Wintringham wrote that led the prosecution case in the infamous treason trial of the Communist Party leadership in 1925; and additional evidence that in the summer of 1936 Wintringham was already propagating the idea of an 'international legion' to fight for Republican Spain. Churchill coined his own expletive as in 'I refuse to be Wintringhamed'; Hemingway wrote his only play, Fifth Column, based on Wintringham and his lover, a supposed 'Trotskyite spy'; and photographs show Orwell and Wintringham together in 1940 training for guerrilla warfare to resist a Nazi invasion such was the dramatic imprint on history of this seminal figure, here revealed in an Enlarged, Revised and Updated edition.

Author Biography:

Hugh Purcell is a Cambridge University educated historian and formerly BBC producer of history documentaries. He has written several books on the twentieth century and the British Raj. Phyll Smith is a librarian and film academic working in Grimsby. In 2007 he curated the exhibition 'The Life and Writing of Tom Wintringham' and in 2008 he was Librarian of the Year.
Release date Australia
April 18th, 2012
Author
Audience
  • General (US: Trade)
Contributor
  • With Phyll Smith
Pages
320
Dimensions
234x156x18
ISBN-13
9781845194482
Product ID
10371875

Customer reviews

Nobody has reviewed this product yet. You could be the first!

Write a Review

Marketplace listings

There are no Marketplace listings available for this product currently.
Already own it? Create a free listing and pay just 9% commission when it sells!

Sell Yours Here

Help & options

Filed under...