Category Archives: news & events

A Cold War Tragedy

A Cold War Tragedy

Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’

Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.

More information here.

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In conversation with Ed Miliband

Inspired and informed by his hugely popular podcast, Reasons to be Cheerful, Ed Miliband’s new book, Go Big: How To Fix Our World, shows us that whilst the challenges we face as a society are daunting, solutions to them already exist. This empowering, uplifting set of practical and transformative solutions – from a citizens’ assembly in Mongolia to the UK’s largest cycle network in Greater Manchester –sees Miliband draw from the most imaginative and ambitious of ideas to provide a vision for how to remake society.

Book here https://cambridgeliteraryfestival.com/product/ed-miliband/…

Levelling up: Histories, Cultures, Challenges

Melissa Benn will be taking part in this discussion on May 17th 17:30 pm – 19:00 pm

Online-via Zoom: book via this link https://www.history.ac.uk/events/levelling-histories-cultures-challenges

The government’s ‘Levelling Up’ agenda comes at a time when Covid has revealed, and often increased, existing structural inequalities in the UK. These range from employment to housing, and education to healthcare. They include regional disparities in wealth, widening gaps in life expectancy across ethnicity, and uneven access to resources from libraries to leisure centres. What might a cultural history of Levelling Up tell us about the new political narratives being shaped around this agenda? How might the government’s emphasis on ‘stronger towns’ rebalance our economic map of the UK? What might a level playing field look like in terms schooling, accommodation, or wellbeing? What does ‘Levelling Up’ mean, and how will we know if it has succeeded? Drawing on a variety of disciplines, methods, places, and possibilities, this online forum will include new perspectives from Whitehall and town halls, offer provocations from the education sector to the NHS, and consider the role of researchers, policy-makers and communities in addressing these challenges.

This event will be hosted by History & Policy and the Centre for the History of People, Place and Community at the Institute for Historical Research, and the University of Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities. The seminar format will include micro-presentations from a range of perspectives and disciplines across policy and research, Q&A and discussion.

Speakers include:

Melissa Benn, Writer and Campaigner Andrew Haldane, Chief Economist, Bank of England Will Jennings, Director, Centre for Towns; Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Southampton Owain Lloyd James, Head of Places Strategy, Historic England Helen Nicholson, Professor of Theatre and Performance, Royal Holloway, University of London & Jenny Hughes, Professor in Drama, University of Manchester Simon Szreter, Professor of History and Public Policy, University of Cambridge Jonathan Gross, Lecturer in Culture, Media & Creative Industries, King’s College London

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Melissa Benn in zoom-free conversation with John Bercow

Saturday 24 April 2021 | 11:15am

Order! Order! Former Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, talks candidly about his no-holds barred memoir Unspeakable with Melissa Benn. This event will be filmed in London in the days before it is shown on-line – so no zoomy-ness involved, just real people in real conversation. But John Bercow will be available at the time of transmission to answer people’s questions arising from the discussion.

Book here: https://cambridgeliteraryfestival.com/product/john-bercow-spring-21/ £6.00 – Single event ticket £35.00 – £50.00 – Festival Pass

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Melissa makes guest appearance on Thelma & Tom Look Left…

Melissa makes guest appearance on Thelma & Tom Look Left…

Listen to Thelma & Tom Look Left – episode Five, with Melissa Benn, in which is discussed all manner of subjects and people – including Clement Attlee, Frank Ocean, Marvin Gaye, Keir Starmer…… oh, and why the left so often get wooden under media scrutiny.

Rachel Holmes: Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel

Rachel Holmes: Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel

Click here to watch Melissa Benn’s interview, recorded in London last autumn, with biographer and campaigner Rachel Holmes about her new book Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel. The discussion was filmed as part of the 2020 winter Cambridge Literary Festival programme.

 

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Podcast appearance

Podcast appearance

Melissa appears in the Reasons to be Cheerful podcast: YOU’RE NEVER TOO OLD: a lifelong learning revolution.

Ruskin College appearance

Ruskin College appearance

Melissa will be a guest speaker at a special Friends of Ruskin College, Birthday Celebration Online event, on Monday February 22nd at 6.30pm.

Details here.…

Malvern appearance

Malvern appearance

Melissa will be interviewing Rachel Holmes about her biography of the formidable suffragette and lifelong socialist Sylvia Pankhurst at the Malvern Festival of Ideas on Saturday March 6th at 10-11am.

Details here.…

Latest writing

THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY

The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War

PETER MANDLER, 2020

Oxford: Oxford University Press

361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145

Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.

In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.

On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…

Latest news & events

A Cold War Tragedy

Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’

Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.

More information here.

 …

Melissa Benn