Bertrand Russell books published by Spokesman Books the imprint of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.

Spokesman has published new editions of two short stories by Bertrand Russell which first appeared in the 1950s. We have also reprinted Roads to Freedom, Icarus and the Future of Science and German Social Democracy.

This section contains all the details on The Spokesman, the journal of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.

It features independent journalism on peace and nuclear disarmament, human rights and civil liberties, and contemporary politics. Contributors include Robert Fisk, Naomi Klein and Kurt Vonnegut

'I've just had chance to read The Spokesman ... its really first rate.' Noam Chomsky

Here you will see each individual issue.

You may order each separately or subcribe to The Spokesman

We publish a number of new editions of Bertrand Russell's Philosophical Classics.

In this section you can view the titles that are available to buy now.

Logic and Knowledge was the first of the series to be published. It contains one of Russell's most influential pieces On Denoting.

Cover Portrait by Hans Erni, with grateful acknowledgements © Hans Erni, Lucern

Spokesman Books have started to create ePUB eBooks and to showcase our new venture we'd like to give you the opportunity to read one of our digital editions of The Spokesman completely FREE.

This section of the website will be added to as we develop more eBooks.

John Arden, playwright and novelist, born 26 October 1930; died 28 March 2012. In 2009, produced a glorious collection of stories entitled Gallows and Other Tales of Suspicion and Obession, which mingles black comedy with melodrama to probe the underside of Irish and English history from the 17th century to the 21st.

He is the author of a variety of plays, including All Fall Down, which appeared in 1955, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance (1959), Live Like Pigs, and The Non-Stop Connolly Show, co-authored and co-produced in 1975 with Margaretta D'Arcy. The Business Of Good Government (1960) was their first collaboration.

Silence Among the Weapons, his first novel, was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Cogs Tyrannic, a collection of short stories, received the PEN Short Story Prize and his story, 'Breach of Trust,' from the 2003 collection, The Stealing Steps, took the V.S.Pritchett Memorial Prize. Books of Bale: a fiction of history, appeared in 1988. He has also written drama for children, radio plays and work for television, including, with Margaretta D'Arcy in 1973, the documentary Sean O'Casey: Portrait of a Rebel

In order to make Gallows readily available to John Arden’s many admirers in Britain, Spokesman has ordered stock from the Irish publishers (Original Writing) for sale through its website.

Our good comrade and friend, Michael, died in London on 7 May after several weeks in hospital following a fall at home. During his long and eventful life, he worked closely with the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and the Institute for Workers’ Control, and was a regular contributor to The Spokesman journal. We shall miss him greatly.

Michael Barratt Brown had written extensively throughout his life on economics, workers' control and politics. During his long career he served in a Quaker Ambulance Unit and worked for the United Nations and, subsequently, in documentary films, in workers' education, in industrial democracy, in socialist economics, in resisting nuclear warfare, in honest academic research, and in Fair Trade among co-operative organisations.

He wrote an autobiography in which he recalls something of the places, people, family and friends with whom he has been seeking to find a way to live a decent life, and to help others to do the same. Not always successful in these endeavours, he has nevertheless found wonderful love and friendships, as Seekers: A Twentieth Century Life makes clear.

His father, Alfred Barratt Brown, wrote Great Democrats. Long out of print, Spokesman Books has printed a new edition, which restores to new generations a seminal work in the struggle against the rise of fascism in Europe during the 1930s.

Tony Benn, formerly the leading light of the parliamentary left in Britain and long time peace campaigner, is also a celebrated author. He has written a number of stimulating and incisive books and pamphlets, which Spokesman Books have published.

Bukharin was the youngest of the senior leaders of the Russian October Revolution, sometimes described in the earliest days of 1917 as Lenin’s favourite. He had been judicially murdered after a grisly show trial which marked the culmination of Stalin’s round of purges in the late thirties. His widow and son struggled for decades to secure his rehabilitation.

Spokesman Books holds a great collection of titles by the acclaimed Noam Chomsky.

Here you can browse our titles by Noam Chomsky who also regularly appears in our journal The Spokesman of which he said, '

I've just had chance to read The Spokesman ... its really first rate.'

Ken Coates died suddenly at home in Derbyshire on Sunday 27 June 2010, in his eightieth year. He was editor of The Spokesman journal, starting with the first number published in 1970. Issue no.109 carries a full appreciation.

Spokesman Books have an extensive range of
titles written by Ken Coates.

He was the editor of our journal The Spokesman and has written many books on the issue of Workers' Control all of which can be in this section.

Trevor Griffiths was born and educated in Manchester and has been writing for theatre, television and cinema since the late 1960s. Here you can view and purchase the plays, television scripts and screenplays byTrevor Griffiths published by Spokesman Books.

Stuart Holland has been involved in national and international policy making since he was an economic and political assistant in the Cabinet Office and 10 Downing Street in the 1960s.

Reviews of four of Stuart Holland's titles can be read here:
The Market Economy: From Micro to Mesoeconomics and
The Global Economy: from Meso to Macroeconomics

Towards a New Bretton Woods

The European Imperative

Zhores Medvedev, a leading international scientist, revealed to an unbelieving world the nuclear disaster which took place at Kyshtym in the Urals during the 1950s, confounding nuclear ‘experts’ who denied his case. He tells this story in a preface to the new edition of his classic study, The Legacy of Chernobyl, which Spokesman published on 6 August to mark Hiroshima Day.

We have published a number of titles by Dr Medvedev and he has featured in our journal, The Spokesman.

Thomas Paine, revolutionary and philosopher, whose bicentenary falls in 2009.

We have published a number of different titles concerned with this great man. These Are The Times: A Life of Thomas Paine is an original screenplay by Trevor Griffiths, which follows Tom Paine from persecution in England, to the American War of Independence, to Revolutionary France. It has recently been adapted for theatre and A New World makes its premiere at Shakespeare's Globe this summer (29th August - 9th October).

Another recent publication is Thomas Paine: In Search of the Common Good. The book offers reflections on his life and writings by a group of experts and specialists who came together at a Thomas Paine Colloquium held at the United Nations in New York.

All these titles and more can be found on our Thomas Paine page.

Spokesman Books enjoyed a great relationship with Kurt Vonnegut and in this section you will find the many articles and pamphlets he so kindly had published with us.

On Mark Twain
Fates Worse Than Death

Issues of The Spokesman he has featured in:
Confessions of a Terrorist
Dark Times
America's Gulag
From Tom Paine to Guantanamo
Fallujah: Shock and Awe
The Suicide Bombers
How to Lose a War
Legacies of Harm
Brown Studies

Dexter Whitfield is Director of European Services Strategy Unit and Adjunct Associate Professor, Australian Workplace Innovation and Social Research Centre, University of Adelaide.

He has a unique, extensive track record of research, policy analysis and strategic advice to public bodies, trade unions and community organisations (www.european-services-strategy.org.uk).

Key Words is committed to developing the tradition of cultural materialism derived from the founding analysis of culture and society in the work of Raymond Williams.

Customers of the Russell Press sometimes request help with international standard book numbers (ISBNs), bar codes, and other matters in order to make their publications available more widely to the public and book trade. To meet this need, we evolved the idea of an imprint, Leen* Editions, and purchased ISBNs accordingly.

Leen Editions titles are registered with Nielsen’s, the main book trade database, and distributed by Central Books, based in London. Central Books already distribute for Spokesman Books, the publishing imprint of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, sister company of the Russell Press.


*The River Leen flows near Russell House, on its way to the Trent.

Our History section includes titles such as
J. A. Hobson's Imperialism, The Levellers by H. N. Brailsford and edited by Christopher Hill, A History of British Socialism by Max Beer, A Radical Reader by Christopher Hampton and The Making of the Labour Movement: The Formation of the Transport and General Workers' Union 1870-1922 by Ken Coates and Tony Topham.

Spokesman publishes selected writings of historical figures such as Nikolai Bukharin and his wife Anna Larina, Thomas Spence, John Wheatley, Harry Gosling, George Lansbury and Fenner Brockway.

Books on economy by writers such as Stuart Holland, K. William Kapp, Ken Coates, Michael Barratt Brown and Dexter Whitfield can be found in this section of our website.

Titles by Stuart Holland include:
Global Economy: From Meso to Macroeconomics
Market Economy: From Micro to Mesoeconomics

K. W. Kapp:
The Social Cost Of Business Enterprise

You can also find several titles from our European Labour Forum series.

What is education for? What should be taught? Who should control schools? How should educational progress be measured? How much testing is too much testing? Do academy schools 'work'?

These are among the questions asked and answered here in our Education section.

A number of our titles are texts that are used for teaching in universities, colleges and schools.

Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy and Logic and Knowledge by Bertrand Russell, for example, feature in philosophy reading lists. Community Development in Theory and Practice is a standard text on some community development courses.

Here we list all our teaching text titles for you to browse.

The Institute for Workers' Control was formed in 1968 to act as a research and educational body, to co-ordinate discussion and communication between workers' control groups and trade unions, and to publish important materials on industrial democracy and workers' control.

Here you will find details of those publications which are still available, including many pamphlets from the IWC series.

PDFs of most of the IWC pamphlets are available from www.socialistrenewal.net/

Cathy Davis and Alan Wigfield's Housing: Did it have to be like this? and Let's Build the Houses - Quick! provides a socialist critique of New Labour's performance in this field.

Dexter Whitfield's new title, In Place of Austerity, uncovers the realities of commissioning, localism, 'big society' empowerment fraud, and the systematic undermining of public services and the welfare state.

'To our generation fell the good fortune of re-discovering the Levellers. To the classical liberal historians they meant rather less than nothing. This neglect is puzzling.

But what we have rediscovered is not merely the fact that the Levellers anticipated our fathers in most of the social and political reforms of the next 300 years; they were, until Cromwell crushed them, the dynamic pioneers, who had the initiative during the most formative years of the Inter-regnum. They would have won for our peasants in the mid-17th century what the Great Revolution gained for those of France at the close of the 18th.'
Christopher Hill talking about H.N. Brailsford's book The Levellers and the English Revolution.

Spokesman Books have published several titles about the Levellers. Browse the titles here in this section or look at our Socialist Classics range for more.

With authors such as Tom Mann, Ken Coates, Tony Topham and R. H. Tawney on subjects ranging from The Making of the Labour Movement, Syndicalism, Workers' Control to Bevanism and Feminism this section is packed full for the discerning reader of Labour History.

Socialist Renewal grew out of the discussions around Labour's abandonment of Clause Four, in 1995. A general invitation was issued to socialist authors to write for us. A dozen pamphlets and half a dozen books followed.

Currently Socialist Renewal is in its 11th Series and is still going strong.

The Socialist Renewal series also has a website dedicated to its publications and provides a space in which to leave comments - http://www.socialistrenewal.net/

Our Socialist Classics range includes:
The Levellers by H. N. Brailsford,
A Radical Reader by Christopher Hampton and
A History of British Socialism by Max Beer to name only a small few.

Plus our most recent additions:
Inside the Left by Fenner Brockway
The Miracle of Fleet Street: The Story of the Daily Herald by George Lansbury
Tom Mann's Memoirs,

All are introduced by Ken Coates

Our Trade Union Classics series started with Up and Down Stream by Harry Gosling.

Bad News by John Lang and Graham Dodkins charts the Wapping Dispute that involved Rupert Murdoch's News International Limited. The title has received a number of reviews.

In his book, Safe at Work?, Dave Putson demonstrates that health and safety, far from being the product of a more litigious society or the political agenda of overbearing bureaucrats, is rooted in human need, protecting people.

Spokesman's new edition of E P Thompson's Warwick University Ltd 'is extremely welcome. Not only is it a key text on the early 1970s Left, it also highlights with acute prescience two major issues even more relevant today: the attempt by business to intervene in academia and the widespread surveillance of social activists.' Sheila Rowbotham

Based in Nottingham, Spokesman Books publishes a range of titles with local themes. For 2011, we are adding a new, enlarged edition of Means-Test Man by Walter Brierley This celebrated novel, introduced by Andy Croft, describes a week in the life of an unemployed Derbyshire miner. Set in the 1930s and written by a miner out of his own bitter experience, it was one of the most powerful and original novels of that decade.

In their classic 1960s study, Poverty: The Forgotten Englishmen, Ken Coates and Richard Silburn looked again at what was meant by the word 'poverty'. They concluded that vast numbers of English people were, for the most of their lives, living in acute poverty. What this actually involved was spelt out by means of a detailed survey of St Ann's, an area in the middle of Nottingham.

There are more titles to browse in this section.

Spokesman Books' Human Rights, Peace and Nuclear Disarmament titles.

Authors include Bertrand Russell, Noam Chomsky,Tony Bunyan of Statewatch, Robert Hinde of Pugwash UK, Ken Coates, Alva Mydral, George Farebrother, Seymour Melman and Kurt Vonnegut.

Spokesman Books' titles about peace activism in the First World War.

Including A Pacifist at War: Letters and Writings 1914-1918
By Bertrand Russell
Edited by Nicholas Griffin

'The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 dramatically changed almost everything in Bertrand Russell's life. It was the War that made him a public figure and ensured that henceforth philosophy would only occasionally prevail over politics for his attention ... Unlike so many who went enthusiastically to war in the summer of 1914, Russell knew the War would be a disaster. Nor did he share the general British opinion that Germany was entirely responsible. He thought the secret diplomacy of the Liberal administration under Sir Edward Grey, which had entangled Britain in a series of alliances to defend continental countries against aggression, shared a good deal of the responsibility. He had, moreover, no doubts at all that it was his public duty to oppose the War ... '

Nicholas Griffin, McMaster University, Canada

Our New Thinkers Library contains three titles by three extraordinary men:

Bertrand Russell's Let the People Think
V Gordon Childes' Man Makes Himself
and Prehistory of European Society
Benjamin Farrington's Head and Hand in Ancient Greece

Here you can find a list of the best selling titles in our store.

A Radical Reader by Christopher Hampton is a glorious book. With over 600 pages, it is a major anthology which spans 500 years of radical protest from the Peasants’ Revolt to the First World War. Provides an alternative political and social history of England.

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