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Mick Hume
Velvet Revolution: no script for a democratic uprising
Playwright-turned-president Vaclav Havel owed his status as anti-Communist rock star more to the West than to the Czech people.
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| Tuesday 20 December 2011 |
Michael Fitzpatrick
From revolutionary student to Byronic celebrity
Michael Fitzpatrick recalls his first meeting with Christopher Hitchens 40 years ago, when there was more to him than flashy posturing.
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| Thursday 8 December 2011 |
Niall Crowley
Who’s in the ‘In Crowd’ these days?
The late US soul singer Dobie Gray provided the theme tune for uppity working-class kids in 1960s Britain.
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| Tuesday 29 November 2011 |
Tim Black
The exploitation of Gary Speed’s death
Details of the Wales manager’s suicide are unknown, yet it’s still being turned into a lesson about mental illness.
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| Friday 7 October 2011 |
Brendan O’Neill
In defence of Steve Jobs
The idea that Jobs and his brilliant Apple gadgets were responsible for alienation in the West and for ‘slavery’ in the East is i-nonsense on stilts.
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| Friday 7 October 2011 |
Nathalie Rothschild
The iMourning for Steve Jobs
The reaction to the death of the Apple boss shows how thoroughly mainstream Princess Di-style public weeping has become.
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| Thursday 4 August 2011 |
Neil Davenport
When social mobility meant something
Stan Barstow, author of A Kind of Loving, captured the inner world of working-class people who left the mines behind.
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| Tuesday 26 July 2011 |
Julia Stitch
Farewell, Goddess with the beehive
In our cynical times there’s something to be said for living intensively, like Amy Winehouse did.
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| Tuesday 26 July 2011 |
Michael P Fitzpatrick
The woman who could have ruled the world
With the death of Amy Winehouse, British music has lost what should have been its brightest talent.
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| Tuesday 3 May 2011 |
Rob Lyons
Henry Cooper: more than a one-punch wonder
The popular British boxer, who died on Sunday, was an icon for an era in sport — and society — that’s long since gone.
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| Monday 14 February 2011 |
Andrew Calcutt
Gary Moore: the bebop guitarist
An appreciation of the Thin Lizzy guitarist who died last week.
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| Wednesday 29 December 2010 |
Brendan O’Neill
RIP Denis Dutton
A friend and fan of spiked who took ideas and the world wide web seriously.
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| Monday 29 November 2010 |
Rob Lyons
Falling fowl of the food snobs
Bernard Matthews became a culinary Antichrist for the chattering classes who never shop anywhere but Waitrose.
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| Wednesday 13 October 2010 |
Tim Black
‘I’ve been bombed and it’s bloody frightening’
A look back at Claire Rayner’s wise words to spiked about war, freedom and modern-day buffoonery.
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| Wednesday 18 August 2010 |
Mick Hume
Tory David Cameron’s debt to Red Jimmy Reid
How the 1971 UCS ‘work-in’, led by the recently deceased firebrand, helped to pave the way for today’s all-in-it-together response to the crisis.
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| Thursday 4 March 2010 |
Fitzpatrick and Hume
The last leader of the Labour Party
Two veterans of the revolutionary left, Michael Fitzpatrick and Mick Hume, opt out of the nostalgia-fest following Michael Foot’s death.
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| Friday 29 January 2010 |
Thomas McGlaughlin Jr
Why Salinger still speaks to us
He may not have published very much, but Salinger’s contribution to modern literature was enormous: the creation of a new kind of literary character struggling with the crisis and corrosion of The Individual.
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| Friday 18 September 2009 |
Patrick West
Keith Floyd and the end of an era
It’s not the death of the wine-soaked celebrity chef that has been changing TV cookery shows, but the recession.
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| Monday 14 September 2009 |
Rob Lyons
Norman Borlaug, RIP
As spiked launches a new debate about the future of food, we mourn the man who fed the world.
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| Monday 20 April 2009 |
James Heartfield
Ballard: explorer of catastrophe
The author of Empire of the Sun and Crash was no dystopian prophet; he used disaster to reimagine the world.
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