29th September 2010
Doors at 6 pm, Talk commences at 7 pm
The Little Shoppe of Horrors, 11 Mare St, London E8.
Tickets £6/£4
The last third of the nineteenth century saw the world in flux. Science vied with religion to represent the soul of man, and technological advances opened the possibility of new ways of living. Yet as the world sank into a long depression, untrammelled capitalism continued to stretch the gulf between rich and poor. From Russia to America, across Western Europe and beyond, governments already unsettled by major shifts in geopolitical power were threatened by growing social unrest and the rise of socialism. And looming over them was the spectre of the Anarchist and the shadow of international terrorism. A Tsar and an Empress, Presidents and plutocrats were all vulnerable to the assassin’s bombs and bullets, but so too was bourgeois society in its cafes and opera houses. It was a new kind of Terror that could strike anywhere and that permeated deep into the imagination of the times.
A masterly exploration of the strange twists and turns of history, The World That Never Was follows the interweaving lives of several key anarchists, and of the secret police who tracked them. Tonight, author Alex Butterworth will present and discuss a revelatory portrait of an era with uncanny echoes of our own.