History is made at night

Sucker for old gramophone record sleeves, advertising the shops they were bought in. I found these examples in a Peckham charity shop, both ...

Some musical/dance images from Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, which I visited this weekend: 'Melody' by Kellock Brown (1894...

The sounds Of the Harlem night Drop one by one into stillness. The last player-piano is closed. The last victrola ceases with t...

The historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) died yesterday at the age of 95.  There's plenty to criticise in his political judgement  as he...

Well you can now watch the whole of Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film Battleship Potemkin for free on youtube . If you don&#...

This article 'Retort Goes to a Party' by Holley Cantine was originally published in the Autumn 1951 issue of Retort, a journal of a...

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin works on two levels -above ground the 'Field of Stelae' conveys a sense of sca...

Langston Hughes was born on this day (1 February) in 1902. Here's his great poem Dream Variations (1926): To fling my arms wide In some...

F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 short story The Popular Girl is centred around the figure of Yanci Bowman and her desire for more than the l...

'Her first ball! She was only at the beginning of everything. It seemed to her that she had never known what the night was like before. ...

Tibetan singer Tashi Dhondup is reportedly serving 15 months hard labour after being arrested by the Chinese authorities for his 'subve...

'the Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audac...

'Danger in Familiarities' - the American Social Hygiene Association advises on 'The Correct Dancing Position' from 1922: ...

THE VOICE: ...You will be known during your fifteen years as a ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz baby, and a baby vamp. You will dance new dan...

An acccount from the excellent Keep Cool - The Black Activists Who Built the Jazz Age by Ted Vincent (Pluto Press, 1995): 'The musical ...

Tina Modotti (1896-1942) is best known as photographer, but her's was one of those lives that joined the dots between different radica...

"In 1927 the charge of keeping a disorderly house at 25, Fitzroy Square, near Euston Station, was brought after a long period of survei...

Benjamin Péret (1899-1959) was active in the Surrealist movement from its formation until his death. Among other things he edited at one sta...

'Queer urban culture was the site of diverse intersecting modes of queerness and "normality," coalescing around their desires ...

Anita Berber (1899-1928) was a dancer in pre-Nazi Germany, famous/notorious for a life of bisexuality, drugs and semi-naked performance. Wit...