“People exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy fireball were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away. The small black bundles now stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima numbered in the thousands. At the same instant birds ignited in midair. Mosquitoes and flies, squirrels, family pets crackled and were gone.”
“We all want to change the world”, sang John Lennon, a sentiment most of us could agree with. Lennon was inspired by the widespread political protests of the late 1960s, including mass strikes by French workers that nearly brought down the government. It seemed back then that radical change was on the agenda.
Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64) is often described as the “founder of German social democracy”. But his influence on the German workers’ movement was mostly disastrous.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets—and arguably the greatest. The critic Harold Bloom described him as “a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem”. But he was much more than that: he was also a passionate revolutionary.
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Archie Roach’s sons, Amos and Eban, have given permission for their father’s name and image to be used “so that his legacy will continue to inspire”.