Nicholas Murray

Nicholas Murray is a member of the executive of Bermondsey Labour Party and a contributor to London Labour Briefing, On 2 August, Robert Mellish, the veteran Labour MP for Bermondsey, Southwark, announced his resignation from the Party, in consequence of the battles which have been going on in the constituency. He appeared the same evening on television, to speak, in some distress, about the ‘Mafia’ who have opposed him there. Nicholas Murray gives an adversary’s account of certain episodes in the history to which Mr Mellish was referrrng, and explains the position of the youneer generation of left-wing activists who will be supporting Peter Tatchell in he by-election which now lies ahead: Mr Mellish means to resign his Parliamentary seat if Tatchell’s candidature is endorsed by the National Executive Committee.

Letter

On Carmen Callil

15 December 2022

Marina Warner in her generous piece about Carmen Callil says that she ‘commissioned ambitiously’ (LRB, 15 December 2022). She also commissioned with splendid impulsiveness. In August 1982 the LRB carried a piece I had written about the background to the political upheavals in Bermondsey. The day after the issue appeared she called me at work – mentioning in passing that she was in bed – to...

Carpetbagging in Bermondsey

Nicholas Murray, 19 August 1982

A little over four years ago I joined the Labour Party. I was recruited on my doorstep by a member of the local branch, a quick, wiry, energetic man in his fifties who appeared just at the right moment. After a nomadic wandering across London from bedsit to bedsit, flatshare to flatshare, my cardboard boxes and suitcases eventually necessitating some form of transportation larger than a taxi, my wife and I had finally come to rest next door to a pub in North Southwark.

Letter

Tony Harrison

1 April 1982

SIR: Blake Morrison is a little hard on Tony Harrison’s Oresteia: ‘God only knows’ what it is like ‘to have to hear it in the National Theatre’ (LRB, 1 April). I cannot speak for God, but I myself found it, combined with Harrison Birtwhistle’s score and the strictly choreographed masked movement of Peter Hall’s National Theatre company, both rhythmically compelling and visually exciting....

Was Ma Hump to blame? Aldous Huxley

John Sutherland, 11 July 2002

Mrs Humphry Ward and Aldous Huxley, c.1900. Twentieth-century Huxleys have received less biography than one might have expected. Nicholas Murray usefully fills a gap between Sybille...

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