29th September 2010
Doors at 6 pm, Talk commences at 7 pm
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents. The last third of the nineteenth century saw the world in flux. Science vied with religion to represent the soul of man, and technological advances opened the possibility of new ways of living. Yet as the world sank into a long depression, untrammelled capitalism continued to stretch the gulf between rich and poor. From Russia to America, across Western Europe and beyond, governments already unsettled by major shifts in geopolitical power were threatened by growing social unrest and the rise of socialism. And looming over them was the spectre of the Anarchist and the shadow of international terrorism. A Tsar and an Empress, Presidents and plutocrats were all vulnerable to the assassin's bombs and bullets, but so too was bourgeois society in its cafes and opera houses. It was a new kind of Terror that could strike anywhere and that permeated deep into the imagination of the times. Its true weapon, though, was not dynamite but fear itself: a fact quickly grasped by those whose job it was to protect the powerful. Yet in a credulous age, when hoaxers and forgers thrived, the fictions spun by police chiefs and their agent provocateurs were often no less beguiling. And out of the short-term actions of these forgotten individuals grew the noxious delusions of worldwide conspiracy that would poison the century to come. A masterly exploration of the strange twists and turns of history, "The World That Never Was" follows the interweaving lives of several key anarchists, and of the secret police who tracked them. Framed by the Paris Commune of 1871 and the 1905 revolution in St Petersburg, and spread across five continents, their's is the story of a generation that saw the dream of Utopia crumble, to be replaced by a dangerous desperation. Alex Butterwork will present and discuss a revelatory portrait of an era with uncanny echoes of our own.
Alex Butterworth
Alex Butterworth is a writer, dramatist and researcher who has worked across a wide range of media; his projects include television drama-documentaries, virtual online communities, educational websites for major cultural institutions and action-adventure games. He is the co-author of the prize-winning history, POMPEII: The Living City, has recently published his second book THE WORLD THAT NEVER WAS and contributed to the BFI survey of developments in the digital field, New Screen Media. He took a first degree in English from the University of Oxford, holds an MA in Interactive Media from the Royal College of Art and is currently an Honorary Fellow at the University of Birmingham. He lives in Oxford with his wife and two children.
Talk at 11 Mare Street - please click here to buy tickets
