At the weekend, we published an insightful essay by Mollie about the sacrifices that football demands of young women in Manchester. Mollie spoke to young women who had been considered exciting footballing stars as teenagers, only to drop out of the game prematurely, including Liv, who played for Manchester City Juniors: Hilton did eventually come home to Rochdale, and was able to find steady but varied work — until the Great Depression hit. One of millions forced onto the dole, he used the time to read and some of his mates did the same. This small band of semi-illiterate twenty-somethings came together to read about the world, about the crisis, about the official reasons for their hunger, about the cobbled-together solutions of the day’s top politician. Hilton read Marx, he read Shakespeare. They all did. It’s hard to imagine a private school which could have imparted a better knowledge of the classics than that which this bunch of working men in Rochdale gave themselves, while on the dole, in these bleak years. Sources have told the Times that Manchester could completely run out of Monkeypox vaccinations next week. Andy Burnham has written to the health secretary to complain that vaccinations have become concentrated in the capital despite a growing rate of infection in Manchester. He said: "As things stand, we are not expecting to receive enough doses to enable us to vaccinate the 3,500 high-risk individuals we have already identified. Currently, Monkeypox seems to be unevenly affecting gay and bisexual men — almost all the cases in the UK are in young males, with 73% of infections concentrated in London. Burnham has said Manchester will need an "urgent uplift in vaccine supply" before Manchester Pride on August 26. Doherty’s literary past had slammed shut not long after the publication of his masterpiece third and final novel, The Good Lion . Finished in 1958, the novel opens in the late Forties. Its three-year narrative maps the same period in Len's own life, beginning with his arrival by train in Sheffield, all alone, a lad of seventeen.

Vintage set to republish Caliban Shrieks after bartender’s

Respected poet and academic Dr Ian Patterson, of Queens’ College, Cambridge, said: “Hilton was a terrific, provocative, phenomenally surprising writer – a true iconoclast. Hilton was proud to be a plasterer. Part of the magic of Caliban Shrieks is the novel’s interrogation of the status games compelling so many into decades of drudgery, in the mills, trenches, factories. He never wanted to rise above his class, “the lower working-class type,” into mortgaged respectability: "Whenever I’m with the intellectuals I always feel they do not belong to my world,” he wrote, continuing, “...with all their theories and mentalised life they have had very little experience of living…they’ve been too sheltered, and too looked up to." If the price for becoming a professional writer was his position within the working-class — the aspect of his life he believed enabled him to write with such critical directness about what he saw — then he would choose plastering, and proudly so. Over three hundred years of civilised evolution, and still the workhouse for the native, and the spike for the rover, the propertyless are still with us, they are multiplied over a hundred times…You get there about 5.30 and find others there like yourself, waiting aimlessly and fatigued, spread along the road, making a picture of untidiness to the eye of the aesthetic. Slowly a distant thin chained army is streaming in dribbles to the bottom of this road, the prelude, the wait, for the opening of the spike.But despite his talents, Hilton disappeared into obscurity due to a reluctance of big publishers to believe his subject matter had an audience.

‘Humorous courage’ and ‘fearful realism’ – George Orwell on

His piece for us is just as thrilling, covering a similar topic, but with the story turning out in a very different way. Len Doherty was a working-class author who was feted by the establishment before suddenly withdrawing from the literary scene. He later became a high profile journalist in Sheffield but his career was cut short by a chance encounter with unimaginable horror. From a childhood of poverty, yet joy and freedom, to the punishing grind of factory life and the idiocy of being sent blindly into war, Caliban Shrieks’ narrator takes readers on a lyrical tour of life as a young man born into the first days of the 20th century. Greater Manchester leaders have written to the government calling for an "urgent rethink" of HS2’s Manchester plans. They say the proposal to build a cheaper overground station at Manchester Piccadilly is the wrong solution and could "damage the North for generations”. Andy Burnham said: “This is a huge moment and the decisions that are made now will affect the prospects for people here in the North for hundreds of years to come. A second-class choice for HS2 at Manchester Piccadilly station will be a hammer blow to any prospects of really Levelling Up our country." OT Creative Space in Old Trafford has a ‘Twilight Art Class’. It’s a 6-week art course, and no experience is needed. You’ll learn how to create art with charcoal, pastels, and watercolours. Starts 6.15pm. Info here .

This weekend marks the start of Music in the Round’s annual Sheffield Chamber Music Festival . Featuring performances from some of the world's best musicians, including Sheffield's brilliant Ensemble 360, the festival takes place in the incomparable setting of the Crucible Playhouse where the audience surrounds the performers on all sides. The programme begins with a launch event on Friday, 12 May and ends on Saturday, 20 May. Doherty had always been out of place. His columns for The Star were not his first choice of written medium: he'd produced three excellent novels in the Fifties, despite the arduous demands of his then- day job — down the mines. He'd worked in pits since he was seventeen, and was always deeply proud of this first calling, especially as the pivot to journalism relegated him to an office of “fokkin' graduates.” While he respected and could get on with many of his colleagues at The Star , the middle-class trimmings of the average journalist grated on the rough and ready Len. How Green was the Psychedelic Revolution? Acid King Richard Kemp breaks his 45-year silence January 6, 2023 Patterson’s right: Caliban Shrieks is an acid bath for the kind of ideas and assumptions that, prior to its publication, had gone almost entirely unquestioned in literature, even within the progressive flanks of the modernist movement. After Hilton’s exit from writing it would still be years before any movements in the arts launched similar challenges. I've read many authors' words who hail from Manchester and Lancashire and I would love to read this book too.

He captured the imagination of Orwell and Auden — then he

Cities of the Dreadful Future: The Legacy of Psychogeography, Urbanism and the Dérive in London and Paris January 9, 2023 As to the sociological information that Mr Hilton provides, I have only one fault to find. He has evidently not been in the Casual Ward since the years just after the war, and he seems to have been taken in by the lie, widely published during the last few years, to the effect that casual paupers are now given a “warm meal” at midday. I could a tale unfold about those “warm meals”. Otherwise, all his facts are entirely accurate so far as I am able to judge, and his remarks on prison life, delivered with an extraordinary absence of malice, are some of the most interesting that I have read. Another great article (‘ What football asks of young women ’), which I really enjoyed, not just because I was a women’s football chairman for 25 years, but also because it does capture the conflicts and clashes off the field, as well as on it. BillAs BPC couldn’t find George Orwell’s review of Caliban Shrieks online, we did a paper-search and transcribed it. One of the main arguments for the value of Hilton’s writing today is the way it probes the development of his own ideas, his own relationship to the myths that hold up the class system. His writing models this process of critical self-examination to the reader, as if in invitation for us to join in. Benjamin Clarke is a professor of literature at the University of North Carolina. He tells me how this depth in Hilton went unseen — “[Hilton’s] writing is so distinctive, it’s so unusual, I would like to think people would see it today and understand that there are so many dimensions to working-class writing; it goes far beyond just simplistic realist accounts of what happens in factories or mines.” Z-Arts in Hulme has an interactive exhibition, called Fairytales. It’s a world of play and storytelling for little ones and their grownups. Dates throughout the week, but typically open from 10am. Book here .