The Virtual Stoa

Betty Reid, communist, born, appropriately enough, 1 May 1915; died January 4 2004.

Edwin Muir, poet and critic; also ILPer and guild socialist; born in Orkney, 15 May 1887; died at Cambridge, 3 January 1959.

Emily Lutyens, theosophist, feminist, socialist, vegetarian; born in Paris, 26 December 1874, died at Paddington, 3 January 1964. Brought up in Portugal, India, England and France, she married the architect Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) and joined the women’s movement, working in the Moral Education League (campaigning for prostitues suffering from venereal disease) and later the WSPU (her sister Constance Bulwer-Lytton was a hunger-striker). Annie Besant converted her to theosophy; she would later write Candles in the Sun, her memoir of her time in this peculiar movement. In 1916, she started a campaign for Indian self-rule. “This was perhaps tactless”, notes the ODNB, “as her husband was then designing an imperial capital at New Delhi.”

Over at some website or other called DVD Outsider by some chap called Slarek:

But my choice for DVD release of the year is…

Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films – region 2, BFI

This was an easy decision. The most comprehensive DVD set of the year has been assembled with passion and care in every department, from the remastered transfers to the extensive and sometimes rare extra features to form a Svankmajer completist’s dream package. If you’re at all interested in animation or surrealism or art then you should own this set. Knowing that it was a real labour of love for Michael Brooke, the driving force behind this excellent package, inevitably adds you your appreciation of the work that has gone into it. Fabulous.

Will Thorne, general secretary of the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers and Labour MP for West Ham (South) (renamed Plaistow in 1918), 1906-1945; born Birmingham, 8 October 1857, died at Plaistow, West Ham, 2 January 1946.

Everyone’s favourite Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek. Best known for his immortal literary creation The Good Soldier Švejk, Hašek earned his revolutionary credentials as a Bolshevik commissar in the Red Army, a period of his life fictionalised in the stories collected in The Red Commissar and other stories. Born in Prague, 30 April, 1883, died in Lipnice, 3 January, 1923. There’s an image of his grave here.

Mary Macarthur, trade unionist, Anti-Sweating campaigner and ILPer; wife of William Anderson (DSW, #264); born in Glasgow 13 August 1880, died at Golders Green, London, 1 January 1921.

Harry Magdoff, American socialist, one of the editors of Monthly Review, born 21 August 1913, died 1 January 2005.

Louis-Auguste Blanqui, French insurrectionary socialist. Pic of his grave here. More info here, with some original texts handily archived here. Born 8 February 1805, died 1 January 1881.