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'A kind of epic poem, one that moves in circular fashion from passionate denunciation to intense autobiographical reflection ... should be required reading for every MP, peer, councillor, civil servant and commentator. The fury and sense of powerlessness that so many people feel at government policy beam out of every page.' The Guardian 'It is not enough to read Harry's record of the struggles and hopes of a generation – we have to re-assert his principles of common ownership and the welfare state. If Harry can do it, we should too!' Ken Loach, Director of I, Daniel Blake 'As one of the last remaining survivors of the Great Depression and the Second World War, I will not go gently into tha...
The papers that appear in this volume are refereed versions of presenta tions made at the third Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop, held at Stirling University, Scotland, from 31 August to 2 September 1994. The aim of this series of conferences has been to explore the interface between Neural Computing and Psychology: this has been a fruitful area for many researchers for a number of reasons. The development ofNeural Computation has supplied tools to researchers in Cognitive Neuroscience, allowing them to look at possible mechanisms for implementing theories which would otherwise remain 'black box' techniques. These theories may be high-level theories, concerned with interaction betw...
'Harry Leslie Smith is a vital and powerful voice speaking across generations about the struggle for a just society' Jeremy Corbyn THIS A CALL TO ARMS FOR THE MANY, NOT THE FEW: DON'T LET THE PAST BECOME OUR FUTURE Harry Leslie Smith is a great British stalwart. A survivor of the Great Depression, a Second World War veteran, a lifelong Labour supporter and a proud Yorkshire man, Harry's life has straddled two centuries. As a young man, he witnessed a country in crisis with no healthcare, no relief for the poor, and a huge economic gulf between the North and South. Now in his nineties, Harry wanders through the streets of his youth and wonders whether anything has actually changed. Britain is...
Twenty-two years old and ready for peace, Harry Leslie Smith has survived the Great Depression and endured the Second World War. Now, in 1945 in Hamburg, Germany, he must come to terms with a nation physically and emotionally devastated. In this memoir, he narrates a story of people searching to belong and survive in a world that was almost destroyed. Hamburg 1947 recounts Smith's youthful RAF days as part of the occupational forces in post-war Germany. A wireless operator during the war, he doesn't want to return to Britain and join a queue of unemployed former servicemen; he reenlists for long term duty in occupied Germany. From his billet in Hamburg, a city razed to the ground by remorseless aerial bombardment, he witnesses a people and era on the brink of annihilation. This narrative presents a street-level view of a city reduced to rubble populated with refugees, black marketers, and cynical soldiers. At times grim and other times amusing, Smith writes a memoir relaying the social history about this time and place, providing a unique look at post-WWII Germany. Hamburg 1947 is both a love story for a city and a passionate retailing of a love affair with a young German woman.
To make a living here, one had to be capable, confident, clever and inventive, know a lot about survival, be able to fashion and repair tools, navigate a boat, fell a tree, treat a snakebite, make a meal from whatever was handy without asking too many questions about it, and get along with folks. This fascinating and instructive book is the careful and unpretentious account of a man who was artful in all the skills needed to survive and raise a family in an area where most people would be lost or helpless. Smith’s story is an important record of a way of life beginning to disappear, a loss not fully yet realized. We are lucky to have a work that is both instructive and warm-hearted and that preserves so much hard-won knowledge.
Since taking power in 2010, the Coalition Government in the United Kingdom has pushed through a drastic program of cuts to public spending, all in the name of austerity. The effects on large segments of the population, dependent on programs whose funding was slashed, have been devastating and will continue to be felt for generations. This timely book by journalist Mary O'Hara chronicles the real-world effects of austerity, removing it from the bland, technocratic language of politics and showing just what austerity means to ordinary lives. Drawing on hundreds of hours of first-person interviews with a wide range of people and, in the paperback edition, featuring an updated afterword by the author, the book explores the grim reality of living amid the biggest reduction of the welfare state in the postwar era and offers a compelling corrective to narratives of shared sacrifice.
Barley Hole was for my great grandfather Canaan, the land of milk and honey. For my father, it was paradise lost and for my mother, Barley Hole was a curse. It was a place that haunted her spirit and her soul throughout her life. To me, Barley Hole is a name forever etched on the map of my family's heart; it is where betrayal and injustice nearly thrust us into oblivion. The Barley Hole Chronicles are an odyssey of the human spirit that stretch across time and geography to incorporate, diverse personalities, personal hardships, World Wars and the struggle for peace and love, in a society fallen from grace. These Chronicles document one Yorkshire family's decent into the wilderness of poverty and hunger. It is a personal record of one young man's struggle to survive the great depression, the Second World War and the hazards and wonders of life in post war Germany. The Barley Hole Chronicles are a summation of two memoirs by Harry Leslie Smith 1923 and Hamburg 1947. The Barley Hole Chronicles are a true account of a time and place when life, full of raw emotion, was never so real. It is also a social history of the 20th century at its bloodiest and deadliest time.
Collects excerpts from the personal travel journal sketchbooks of forty-three artists, illustrators, and designers.
Among the many conceits of modern thought is the idea that philosophy, tainted as it is by subjective evaluation, is a shaky guide for human affairs. People, it is argued, are better off if they base their conduct either on know-how with its pragmatic criterion of truth (i.e., possibility) or on science with its universal criterion of rational necessity. Since Helmholtz, there has been increasing concern in the life sciences about the role of reductionism in the construction of knowledge. Is psychophysics really possible? Are biological phenomena just the deducible results of chemical phenomena? And if life can be reduced to molecular mechanisms only, where do these miraculous molecules come...