Keith Flett - Activities

Activities

Letters from "Keith Flett, London N17" are regularly published in the press, literary and political journals, advancing his favoured causes of socialism and the Beard Liberation Front. Flett's contributions appear in the letters pages of the London Review of Books, Private Eye, New Statesman, The Morning Star, What's Brewing and Tribune. Flett has claimed that his first published letter was in The Guardian, criticising an article by Eric Hobsbawm on Soviet history.

Flett has written and edited a number of history books. He has also written for the left-wing newspaper the Socialist Worker and is an active supporter of the Socialist Workers Party. He is convenor of the London Socialist Historians Group and the president of the Haringey Trades Council.

Flett is the 'organiser' of the Beard Liberation Front (which campaigns against the trend of New Labour politicians removing their facial hair to show a more moderate, presentable, image to the public). He is also associated with Campaign for Real Conkers. In this Flett forms part of a British satirical tradition of using tongue-in-cheek flippancy to make more serious political points.

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Famous quotes containing the word activities:

    That is the real pivot of all bourgeois consciousness in all countries: fear and hate of the instinctive, intuitional, procreative body in man or woman. But of course this fear and hate had to take on a righteous appearance, so it became moral, said that the instincts, intuitions and all the activities of the procreative body were evil, and promised a reward for their suppression. That is the great clue to bourgeois psychology: the reward business.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    As life developed, I faced each problem as it came along. As my activities and work broadened and reached out, I never tried to shirk. I tried never to evade an issue. When I found I had something to do—I just did it.
    Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)

    Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.
    Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)