(Smokestack Books, £9.99)
AT THE very beginning of 2020 Martin Rowson cartoonist, poet and brazen scribe of the end times took a train from Lewisham to Charing Cross. A fortnight later, during an event in London’s Cartoon Museum, he started feeling unwell.
“For the next two weeks I was incapable of anything,” he writes at the beginning of Plague Songs, “feeling iller than I had for 50 years.”
Though exhibiting telltale symptoms now familiar to many breathlessness, night sweats, aching joints it never crossed his mind that he “could possibly be suffering from the disease in China increasingly dominating the news.”
And why would he? Over the following months, as incoming travellers remained untested and the prime minister failed to attend several Cobra meetings on what was swiftly becoming an international public health emergency, the government refused to properly inform us of the dangers of Covid-19 quite the contrary, they were downplayed or take steps
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AS INTERNATIONAL Working Women’s Day approaches, it feels timely to reflect upon the myriad ways in which the dissenting histories of women have been censored and obscured, with their commitment and profound contribution to radical social change omitted from our popular narratives of global struggle and erased over time.
Even in the most publicly accessible story of women’s activism, that of the women’s suffrage movement, so many voices have been lost or elided, edited out in order to create an acceptable version of this once incendiary campaign, a version that the capitalist patriarchy will tolerate liberal, not militant, reformist, not revolutionary and overwhelmingly middle class.