The bard celebrates two other fine practitioners of the art, and laments a lost brewer
This is a year of centenaries. The birth of Dylan Thomas. The start of the Great War. But among 2014 milestones, there’s one anniversary which is going, it seems to me, under-celebrated.
It’s a hundred years this year since the first publication of Robert Tressell’s big, important, rambunctious and utterly brilliant novel, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.
The novel is about the lives of a group of Edwardian house painters — their work, their leisure, their children, their deaths. Most importantly, their struggle against profit-seeking bosses who consider them only in terms of how much they can be exploited.
ROGER D HARRIS and SARA FLOUNDERS challenge propaganda against the blockaded socialist island
In the second of a series of interviews with leaders of progressive parties in Wales ahead of the May 7 Senedd election David Nicholson talks to Welsh Green Party leader ANTHONY SLAUGHTER
Two inspring books — that’s your New Year’s musing from me on January 2 2026
LAURA PIDCOCK and PAUL O’CONNELL introduces Rise, a political platform for working-class activism


