And the reviews are in!

It's taken a while. But the reviews are now coming in of my book, A Devilish Kind of Courage: Anarchists, Aliens and the Siege of Sidney Street (published by Reaktion Books, hardback, illustrated and really nicely produced and only £15.99!)

​Here's a taster: 

'Through careful use of police documents, as well as reports in the contemporary Yiddish press, Whitehead renders their [Latvian anarchists'] world in vivid detail: the reader sees the cheap furniture in rented rooms lit by sputtering gas lamps, the love affairs that would sometimes blossom briefly between comrades, and the details of their shared dreams about transforming their homeland.' - TLS

'With its themes of immigration, xenophobia, antisemitism and foreign atrocities on English soil, Whitehead's book is contemporary and relevant. His meticulous research is lightly worn in a book that propels the reader forward in lively, elegant prose.' - The Critic

'brilliantly recounts the events' - Camden New Journal

'[This] well-researched and detailed book looks like being the definitive study' - Socialist Standard

'a comprehensible and readable narrative' -
Socialist History Society Newsletter

'a master class in social history' - Policing and Society

'This book has certainly renewed my interest in East End Jewish Radicals before the First World War and brings a human side to an important period in working-class politics in East London. I would thoroughly recommend it.' - Socialist History

​It's particularly wonderful to have a full, and appreciative, review in the hugely prestigious TLS (behind a subscription paywall). Here's what Josh Ireland made of the book in a piece entitled - inevitable really - 'Anarchy in the UK'.

Anarchy in the UK: The story of the siege of Sidney Street
By Josh Ireland

May 17, 2024

A DEVILISH KIND OF COURAGE
Anarchists, aliens and the siege of Sidney Street
320pp. Reaktion. £15.99.
Andrew Whitehead

A few days before Christmas in 1910, a gang of Latvian anarchists (nobody knows exactly how many were involved) tried to tunnel their way into a jeweller’s shop on Houndsditch in London. Had they been successful they would have escaped with a haul worth, in today’s terms, more than a million pounds – money they could have used to fund the struggle against tsarist repression back home. Instead they were interrupted after a neighbour noticed the noise they were making. When police arrived to stop them, the thieves opened fire, killing three officers and leaving two others seriously wounded. One robber was hit by one of his comrades’ bullets and died within hours. The others slipped away.

On January 3, 1911, two of the criminals were tracked down to a house in Stepney, 100 Sidney Street. Aware that they were outgunned, the police on the scene appealed for help from the army, who sent Scots Guards equipped with machineguns and horse-pulled artillery (not used). A siege ensued; it went on for six hours, during which time the building caught fire. Nobody intervened. When the authorities picked through the still-hot wreckage, they found two bodies. One gunman had been shot; the other had died from smoke inhalation.

This was clearly a tragedy, but it was also a spectacle exhilarating enough to draw tens of thousands of spectators and grab the attention of the young home secretary, Winston Churchill, who quickly – and many would say rashly – involved himself in proceedings. (It was Churchill who ordered that the fire brigade should not try to quench the blaze consuming the thieves’ hideout.) The incident shocked the population, who were not used to the sound of gunfire and had barely registered the existence of the foreign anarchists living among them. It remains the bloodiest day in the history of London’s police. It is also – along with the Iranian embassy siege of 1980 – the only time in history that troops have opened fire in the British capital. So perhaps it’s no surprise that even before the rubble had been cleared and the bodies carried away, the story was acquiring the dimensions of a myth. The fault line between what actually happened and what the world believed, or wanted to believe, is the focus of Andrew Whitehead’s A Devilish Kind of Courage.

The author patiently explores the haphazard community of Latvian anarchists and their mingling with the other eastern European migrants in the East End. The threads he takes up lead him from Russian prison cells to the streets of Melbourne. Those most directly concerned with the Houndsditch operation – and both men and women played significant roles – were almost all members of a mysterious group known as Liesma, the Latvian word for flame. Through careful use of police documents, as well as reports in the contemporary Yiddish press, Whitehead renders their world in vivid detail: the reader sees the cheap furniture in rented rooms lit by sputtering gas lamps, the love affairs that would sometimes blossom briefly between two comrades, and the details of their shared dreams about transforming their homeland.

A Devilish Kind of Courage also shows how impressions of the anarchists were shaped by the lurid coverage they received from a news media that was itself in the process of being transformed. Printing innovations allowed the sale of halfpenny daily newspapers, which attracted a new mass readership in search of sensationalist accounts. Action photographs had begun to replace artists’ sketches and newsreel cinematography meant that dramatic footage of the day’s events could be shown in cinemas in a matter of hours.

The result of all this was that events could be reported more quickly and in greater detail than ever. But it also meant that myths could be created with unprecedented speed. Inaccuracies, exaggerations and outright falsehoods could swiftly appear in print (or on screen) and, once these phantasms were out in the world, it was harder than ever before to dispel them. The few anarchists unfortunate enough to be swept up by the police in the siege’s aftermath were not given the chance to correct the record. More than 100 years later, Andrew Whitehead’s book makes a strong attempt to do so on their behalf.

Josh Ireland is a writer based in London. He is the author of The Traitors, 2017, and Churchill & Son, 2021 

So I am well pleased with that. And with Mark Glanville's review in the June issue of The Critic - also entitled 'Anarchy in the UK'.

​And there's another very positive and full review by Dan Carrier in the Camden New Journal which is of course - and you should know this - the UK weekly newspaper of the year. ​(This review also appeared in the Westminster Extra and the Islington Tribune).

You want more? Well, here's a recording of the book's launch at the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town - with many thanks to friend, neigbour and camera operator extraordinaire, Brian Kelly:

I've recorded an audio essay with the title 'The Anarchist Big Three and the Siege of Sidney Street', which you can find here. And here Im am talking at the Hackney History Festival -