Added 3 March 2014: Watch the film [LINK: page for the AH film] of this event.
Adam Hochschild’s book “To End All Wars” – the only recent history of World War One to foreground the anti-war movement – has been a major inspiration for this project, and we’re honoured to be co-hosting this event with him on 17 January. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear Mother Jones‘ co-founder Adam Hochschild speaking in the UK.
N.B. This event is also the launch event for “The World is My Country”, with copies of the first poster available to purchase.
About Adam Hochschild
Over the last three decades American writer and activist Adam Hochschild has produced a series of remarkable books on topics including: rubber slavery in the Congo (King Leopold’s Ghost); Stalinist Russia (The Unquiet Ghost); and the British anti-slavery movement (Bury the Chains).
His most recent book To End All Wars: A Story of the Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914 – 1918 – winner of the 2012 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and finalist for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award – is a unique history of the First World War, featuring a ‘cast of characters … more revealing than any but the greatest novelists could invent’, including ‘generals, trade unionists, feminists, agents provocateurs, a writer turned propagandist, a lion tamer turned revolutionary, a cabinet minister, a crusading working-class journalist, three soldiers brought before a firing squad at dawn, and a young idealist from the Midlands who, long after his struggle against the war was over, would be murdered by the Soviet secret police.’
Featuring the well-known (Bertrand Russell, Rudyard Kipling) and the little-known (Violet Tillard, John S. Clarke), the war’s opponents (Emily’s Hobhouse, Charlotte Despard) and its staunchest advocates (Sir Alfred Milner, John Buchan), this is a story of a story of police raids and buried documents, of the gleeful, even mischievous, appropriation of a pompous prosecutor’s words to be used as anti-war propaganda, and of a Commander-in-Chief (John French, 1st Earl of Ypres) whose sister (Charlotte Despard) was a defiant revolutionary and co-founder of the Women’s Peace Crusade.
