Housmans Bookshop is a left wing radical bookshop in London since 1945. We frequently host fascinating authors, speakers, and other guests to talk about their work. For your listening pleasure, these events are recorded and uploaded here so that you too can enjoy our speakers even if you're unable to make it to the bookshop!
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Book Launch: Turning Away by Benjamin A. Saltzman w/ Revd Dr Ayla Lepine
Wednesday, July 22, 2026 • Duration 01:11:25
A sweeping account of how we are at our most human when we turn away from the pains of the world. This is a work of breathtaking scholarship. We are delighted to welcome its author, Benjamin A Saltzman, to Housmans for its UK launch. He will be in conversation with Revd Dr Ayla Lepine.Why do we look away from the suffering of others? Why do we cover our faces in shame? Why do we lower our heads in grief? Few gestures are as universal as the averted gaze. Fewer still are as ambivalent and inscrutable. In this incisive study, Benjamin A. Saltzman reveals how the kaleidoscopic appearance of these gestures in art, poetry, and philosophy has turned them into an essential language for our uncomfortable engagements with the world, challenging us to reflect on the ways we fundamentally relate to others.Into the horizon of contemporary discourse, Turning Away sets out from five influential scenes in which figures avert their gaze: Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Christ’s Crucifixion, and the Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve. The gestures of aversion in these scenes refract across visual media, through philosophy and politics, into modernity and the present day, having been reimagined along the way by thinkers like Hannah Arendt, artists like Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí, poets like Langston Hughes, and many others. Saltzman offers a timely critique of the privilege of turning away and of the too-easy condemnation of our tendencies to do so.
The Plot Is On Fire: Manuela Zechner w/ Max Haiven
Wednesday, July 8, 2026 • Duration 52:24
We are delighted to welcome Manuela Zechner to Housmans to talk about her truly original and radical work in postcolonial eco-theory.As myths of progress and modernisation collapse in the relentless polycrisis of our time, how do we strengthen other plots—in community, practice and struggle? How do we come together as movements for earthcare?The Plot is on Fire: Care Struggles after Progress, Plantation and Patriarchy weaves stories, proposals, and analyses around a key domain of living reproduction in crisis: agriculture. Looking at peasant, indigenous, and transecofeminist practices, it formulates another plot on how we want to sustain life collectively—beyond progress, plantation, and patriarchy.Recovering and repurposing old and new technologies, and breaking down the division between rural and urban, the ground is made fertile for growing other futures. Alongside writers like Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, this work of radical political theory raises critical questions about technology and storytelling, as matters of care and community.Manuela will be in conversation with Max Haiven author of Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (Pluto). They will talk for around 45 minutes to an hour followed by a discussion with the audience.
Privatising Humanity by Kate Bayliss w/ Adrienne Buller
Wednesday, July 8, 2026 • Duration 35:14
Kate Bayliss in conversation with Adrienne BullerPRIVATISING HUMANITY is a powerful exposé of how finance turns our basic human needs into assets.We have entered a new era of turbo-charged financial extraction. Having amassed huge reserves, global finance capital is seeking out fresh areas for profitable investments. Virtually all aspects of our lives are now targeted by someone seeking to make a profit.Kate Bayliss shows how wealthy investors, including asset managers, target our essential services. When it comes to investments in these sectors, shareholder profits are funded by us, the end-users and tax-payers who simply wish to meet our basic human needs for water, warmth and shelter. We have no alternative but to pay into these structures that often generate massive returns for investors and dysfunctional systems for society.Unpacking the details of these processes in three sectors in the UK – water, energy and housing – Bayliss exposes the harmful consequences of this model, which is contributing to deepening inequality.Kate will be joined in conversation by Adrienne Buller, author of The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism.
THE ASSET CLASS: Hettie O'Brien w/ Dan Hecox
Wednesday, June 24, 2026 • Duration 49:01
‘PART WAKE-UP CALL, PART FINANCIAL THRILLER’ (SHAMI CHAKRABARTI) The Asset Class is an equal parts thrilling and enraging work of vital financial journalism, lifting the lid on the relentlessly destructive force of private equity. We are thrilled to welcome the book’s author Hettie O’Brien to Housmans to be interviewed about the book by celebrated journalist Dan Hancox.A thrilling, eye-opening investigation into private equity, a secretive wing of the finance industry that is so relentlessly destructive, it could have been created to undermine our way of life. You don’t know their names, but they own the house you rent. They own your hospitals, nurseries and care homes, the media you consume and the companies you work for. They even own the tools your union uses to fight back. Business is a contest – and they say their people are built to win. But when does competition become a struggle to the death? For decades, private equity firms have infiltrated every corner of modern life. Wielding debt as a weapon, they push vital services into crisis. Their cover story: that this is merely the ‘creative destruction’ essential to growth. Old-school capitalists say they’re dismantling everything that made our economies work.In The Asset Class, reporter Hettie O’Brien penetrates a hidden empire of billion-dollar deals and covert financial warfare. From Copenhagen to San Francisco, Barcelona to the Yorkshire Dales, she follows the money, the ideological roots and the trail of destruction. What she finds is chilling: private equity isn’t just reshaping the economy – it’s selling out the foundations of Western society. The new owners think they can hide in the shadows. But the owned are fighting back.Hettie will be interviewed by Dan Hancox, Guardian journalist and author of Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World (Verso, 2024). They will talk about the book for about 45 minutes followed by a q&a.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS, FOUR MONTHS: The Journal of a Kurdish Political Prisoner
Wednesday, June 10, 2026 • Duration 46:27
Please note that this talk was delivered with the assistance of a translator.
Join for a discussion of the journal of Kurdish revolutionary, Ali Poyraz. He spent twenty-one years and four months in Turkish prisons. He was born in 1962 in Bozüyük, an Alevi village in the Gürün district of Sivas. According to Yeni Özgür Politika, his political consciousness was shaped by his older brother, Hüseyin Poyraz (also known as Rubar Dicle), a member of the PKK Central Committee. In 1981, Ali was captured by Turkish authorities in a rural area of Pazarcık while serving as a PKK cadre. Tried by a military court, he was sentenced to death. Although the Turkish Supreme Court upheld the sentence, it was later commuted to twenty-one years and four months of imprisonment following the abolition of the death penalty in Turkey under Prime Minister Turgut Özal.Ali’s journal records his thoughts and observations, providing invaluable insight into life inside Turkish prisons, including the organisation, morale, and activities of political prisoners. His journal is a mine of information that lends itself to much probing and understanding of the conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK over the past 45 years. This book is published for scholarly purposes, following the recent disbandment of the PKK as an armed force, and the changing political landscape in Turkey today.We will discuss this powerful and important book, followed by a wider discussion of political imprisonment more generally.This event will be chaired by Dr Becka Hudson is a postdoctoral researcher at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research looks at the interaction between imprisonment, mental health diagnosis and colonial domination. She also has 15+ years experience working in campaigns, for struggles against criminalisation, housing injustice and state racism.
LECTURE: Laurence Housman and the Women’s Suffrage Movement
Wednesday, May 27, 2026 • Duration 48:08
Learn about Housmans’ namesake and his efforts to fight for women’s suffrage. This free talk is in collaboration UCL, who hold the Laurence Housman archive. Personal items of Housman’s taken from the archive will be on display.This public lecture will explore Housmans Bookshop namesake Laurence Housman (1865-1958) and his active role in the women’s suffrage movement. It will shed new light on UCL’s Laurence Housman Collection by discussing how Housman’s sociopolitical values emerged during the Victorian period as he developed an artistic practice as an Aesthetic and Decadent illustrator. Housman was also a writer who would go on to contribute to Votes for Women (1908-18), a suffrage newspaper edited by Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence. He would later collaborate with his sister, the engraver Clemence Housman, to found the Suffrage Atelier, an artists’ collective. Using illustration as a form of social and political resistance, Housman designed An Anti-Suffrage Alphabet (1911), a work that featured many women artists who would go on to forge professional careers, including Pamela Colman Smith.Dr Michelle Reynolds is a researcher in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and visual culture. Her PhD thesis, which she completed at the University of Exeter, considered the professionalisation of women illustrators and cartoonists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and their relationship to the socio-political and cultural phenomenon of the New Woman. Her research interests include women artists and designers, illustration and book studies, gender and sexuality, reform movements, dress histories, and graphic satire.
Police the Beats: Lambros Fatsis w/ Adèle Oliver
Wednesday, May 13, 2026 • Duration 49:54
We are absolutely delighted to welcome Lambros Fatsis to Housmans to discuss the criminalizing of black culture, music and youth. We are thrilled also to welcome back the brilliant Adèle Oliver, author of ‘Deeping it: Colonialism, Culture and Criminalisation of UK Drill’, to interview Lambros about his work.Policing The Beats is a bold analysis that exposes the racist policing of Black music. The emergence of UK drill music made headline news, portraying it as a criminal enterprise instead of recognising it as an art form. This new rap subgenre, however, is neither the first nor the only Black music to be targeted this way.Policing the beats rewinds the tape to demonstrate how music has been used as an instrument for policing Black people, from the era of colonial slavery to the present day, revealing the racist legal processes that make crimes out of rhymes.This original and readable book offers the first in-depth account of the policing of Black music in Britain, highlighting the relationship between politics, culture and criminal (in)justice and inviting music lovers, scholars and activists to tune in.
Superweak: Thinking in the 21st Century: Laurent de Sutter in conversation with Alfie Bown
Wednesday, April 29, 2026 • Duration 50:00
Using the stealth capacities of hermeneutic distrust as his weapon of choice, de Sutter’s writing breaks into unrecovered areas of subtle teachings, shedding light on philosophemes gleaned from Aristotle to punk-led attitude, biojewelry, and the historical buildup of authority billed to the triumph of reason in its many intrusive morphs.— Avital Ronell, New York UniversityWe welcome back the brilliant Alfie Bown to Housmans, this time in the company of Belgian philosopher Laurent de Sutter. The two will be focusing their conversation on the nature and necessity (or, rather, superfluity [as posited by Laurent]) of critique. As a jumping off point they will be using Laurent’s recent work of theory, Superweak: Thinking in the 21st Century. The book is described below:‘We have become superheroes. Nothing can resist us anymore: not persons, ideas, facts, realities, or beings. We owe our superhuman strength to a tool we have taken up that submits everything to the scrutiny of our judgment: critique. After its first formulation at the end of the sixteenth century, the project of critique spread from one sphere to another until it became almost universal: we have all of us been transformed by our equal capacity to judge, approve, and reject.If modernity is defined as the journey we have taken to move away from the myths and dogmas of the past, then critique, with its emphasis on reason and the autonomy of judgment, has been the lynchpin of modernity.Today, however, the critical project shows signs of exhaustion. We are beginning to realize that being right is useless, now that everyone can lay claim to the same power as we can. The democratization of reason, proceeding alongside the development of critique through modernity, has produced a stalemate: for every judgment that we pronounce, there is another opposing one – with grounds as solid as our own, and the same right to assert itself. Rather than elevating us above the world, critique has mired us in an impasse of claim and counter-claim. The age of critique is now over and in its place we need to develop a postcritical form of thinking, one he calls “superweak,” a form of thinking based not on establishing grounds, pronouncing judgment, and determining duty, but on welcoming possibility, exploring what the world has to offer, and cultivating a vertiginous appreciation for moving within a world less grounded and less bounded by the terms of critical reason.’Professor Laurent de Sutter is Professor of Legal Theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. He is the author of more than twenty books translated into a dozen languages. In English, he is the author of Narcocapitalism: Life in the Age of Anaesthesia (Polity, 2017) and After Law (Polity, 2020, French Voices Award, Leopold Rosy Prize of the Belgian Royal Academy). He is the editor of the Theory Redux series at Polity Press and of Perspectives Critiques at Presses Universitaires de France.Dr Alfie Bown is Lecturer in Digital Media Culture and Technology at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Dream Lovers (Pluto, 2022), an investigation into dating apps, sexbots and virtual relationships, Post-Comedy (Polity, 2024), Post-Memes (Punctum, 2019) and The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), a psychoanalytic study of video games which is available in Spanish, Portuguese, Serbian, Slovak and many other languages. Currently, he is working on the relationship between psychoanalysis and cybernetics. He is also editor of Everyday Analysis, a pamphlet house and monthly talk series.
NO TO NUCLEAR! Linda Pentz Gunter in conversation with Jonathon Porritt
Wednesday, April 15, 2026 • Duration 49:50
‘Linda Pentz Gunter has done a great service in highlighting the nuclear chain reaction and exposing the huge human and environmental costs. We need this book for our environment and a peaceful world’– Jeremy CorbynWe are delighted to welcome Linda Pentz Gunter to Housmans to discuss her new book No To Nuclear. Brilliantly written, clear, concise and exacting, this brilliant book shows us that there is no silver bullet for the climate crisis—but that hasn’t stopped people searching. Seizing its chance, the nuclear power industry wants us to believe that theirs is the only technical fix for our deliverance. The public, politicians and the media have been easily swayed.This should come as no surprise. After all, the pro-nuclear PR campaign is richly funded and has an army of lobbyists sowing myths while the industry reaps the rewards of taxpayer-funded subsidies.No To Nuclear calls the industry’s bluff. Blasting aside its claims to be safe and green, Linda Pentz Gunter makes the irresistible case that nuclear power is too slow, too expensive, too dangerous and too integrally connected to the nuclear weapons complex, to serve as a rational energy choice.The book also delves into the lives of Indigenous peoples and communities of colour, who have been harmed the most by the nuclear sector, and questions whether the way we devalue nature and the environment is costing us the chance of a genuinely just energy transition.Linda Pentz Gunter is the founder of the US-based non-profit Beyond Nuclear and serves as its international specialist. Previously, she was a journalist at USA Network, Reuters, and The Times. She launched, and writes for Beyond Nuclear’s online magazine, Beyond Nuclear International.Joining Linda in conversation we welcome the environmentalist and writer Johnathon Porritt. Jonathon is a great advocate for the Green Party and frequently contributes to magazines, newspapers and books, and appears on radio and television.‘Linda Pentz Gunter has the great skill that more writers should have: to take a crucial and complex issue and make it truly accessible. This rigorous and comprehensive work is a gift to everyone who wants to understand the nuclear power paradox’– Kate Hudson, previous General Secretary of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Frontierlands by Hazel Sheffield w/ Nadia Idle
Wednesday, April 1, 2026 • Duration 41:23
‘Hazel Sheffield’s book is a warming remedy to the creeping nihilism many feel about the places where they live,’ Jen CallejaWe are delighted to welcome Hazel Sheffield to the shop to discuss her inspiring new book about Britain’s abandoned and neglected places and the opportunities they present for communities, and how they can help us face the challenges of climate change.‘Frontierlands’ are Britain’s forgotten places. Silt-filled harbours, overgrown forests, sunken railway tracks and empty buildings. All once economic engines, now abandoned by investors and the state.But they are home to local communities, and amongst them, some remarkable pioneers working together to repair, rebuild and prepare for the future.Hazel Sheffield takes her readers on a journey that begins at the coastline and travels inward via hoardings and railway arches, factories, streets and neighbourhoods to our homes. Moving from Watchet harbour in the South West to Gateshead in the North East, from Lancashire to London and the South East, she introduces us to the people who are acting to shape their own destinies – people with first-hand knowledge of the problems Britain faces and with clear ideas how to make things better.This is a book about regeneration, reclaiming power, and the hope that comes from community action. About people questioning how the world works and determined to do things differently in the face of economic upheaval and climate crisis. People learning to build a new world, challenging us all to think about how we should live in the face of certain change.Immersive and inspiring, Frontierlands challenges us to reconnect with and reclaim our environment, showing that it is possible to regenerate, reskill and create opportunities for industry, and to address the challenges of climate changeNadia Idle (Novara Media) will chair a discussion about the book for 45 minutes to an hour. The audience are invited to share their experiences. Hazel will be signing books after the event.
