Siobhan Brown

The US singer-songwriter John Prine died on 7 April, following complications from Covid-19. Prine had a profound influence on the American folk-country scene with a career that spanned more than 50 years, though he never reached the commercial heights of some of his peers. He weaved stories of working class life with wry songwriting, seeking to record what he termed the “in-between spaces.” Bob Dylan described his contributions as “Midwestern mind-trips to the nth degree.”

This free, one-room exhibition is the latest in an abundance of programming marking the centenary of the Bauhaus. It brings together over 60 objects to explore the link between the influential design school of Weimar Germany and the Victorian socialist, writer and artist William Morris.

Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius noted the influence of Morris and his contemporaries such as John Ruskin on the school.

This month marks the centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus. It was the most celebrated art, design and architecture movement of the 20th century. It is still hugely influential: from big things, like the buildings we inhabit, to the small things, such as the chairs we sit on. Even the success of Ikea can be put down to its influence.

There has been a recent resurgence in interest in poetry and spoken word written and performed by women. Quite right. This collection puts together 150 poems by women writers, touching on themes from friendship to fashion, protest and resistance.

Director Pablo Larraín’s acclaimed recent film Jackie starred Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy following the assassination of her husband, US president JFK. With Neruda it seems that Larraín — who also directed 2012’s powerful anti-Pinochet drama No — is on more familiar territory, focusing this time on quite a different political figure: the Chilean Nobel prize-winning poet and Communist senator Pablo Neruda.

2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. This graphic novel is an accessible introduction to Russia’s “red year” and contributes to an important interpretation of the events.

Most importantly, it puts working class people as the agents of their own change and is sprinkled with small but significant funny events that bring to life how the revolution affected every aspect of the peoples’ lives.

The introduction of the Tories’ Welfare Reform and Work Bill in July marked the ongoing viciousness of the Conservative government intent on destroying the lives of some of the most vulnerable in society.

Touted by the Tories as making it “pay more to be in work than out of it”, they are now trying to pose themselves as the real party of working people.

The failure of the Labour Party to mount any serious challenge to the bill shows its continuing inability, in its current incarnation, to provide any opposition to austerity.

Not much is known about Lizzie Burns, the working class Irish woman who was also the partner of Friedrich Engels. Mrs Engels, Gavin McCrea’s debut novel, tries to fill in some gaps.

McCrea has clearly put heaps of research into bringing to life the places and people that Lizzie Burns encountered, and it is refreshing given when it is set for the book to have an Irish woman — some of the most vilified at the time — at its centre.

The shock result of a Conservative majority government was the news we didn’t want to hear. Most of us thought we wouldn’t. Ordinary people across Britain despaired at the thought of yet more cuts, redundancies and privatisation.

The Tories have already announced some of the most vicious cuts they can muster, with plenty more to come. That Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, has said that it is irrelevant for voters to know where £12 billion worth of welfare cuts will come from suggests they plan to only get nastier.

The Great Dock Strike of 1889 represents New Unionism’s most significant action, involving thousands of workers in east London. An estimated 150,000 families relied on port work in the 1880s. It was mostly casual, with just 10 percent of workers having permanent and regular employment.