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Photograph by Chris Haigh


LINKS:
- Guardian Online: Anthony
- Peter Tatchell's website
- Blackwell bookshop

The Sixties and the Legacy of Idealism
With Andrew Anthony, Sheila Rowbotham, Dominic Sandbrook, Peter Tatchell and Helen Taylor
12 May 08
Arnolfini, Bristol

Forty years on the 1960s look like the last great outpouring of optimism and idealism, as signalled in that incredible year of 1968. How do we look back at the Sixties now? What do activists then think of society and politics now? Does idealism exist anymore in the face of criticism of multiculturalism and looming environmental disaster? Is liberalism now doing more damage than good?

Sheila Rowbotham, socialist feminist theorist and writer with a long history of activism, is the author of the memoir Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties. Peter Tatchell is a human rights campaigner and a member of the queer rights group OutRage! and the left wing of the Green party. He is the Green Party's parliamentary candidate for Oxford East. Andrew Anthony is an Observer and Guardian journalist, and member of the liberal left. His latest book, The Fallout is about broken dreams, darkened illusions and big questions that no longer match their received answers. Dominic Sandbrook’s two books, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles and White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties, 1964-1970, have been widely praised.

Chaired by Helen Taylor, University of Exeter, who was active in the United States in the late Sixties as a graduate student.

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