-
Peter Marriner: undercover hero of the anti-fascist movement
Peter Marriner, who has died at the age of 77, was an undercover informant in the extreme right for many years, and one of those extraordinary people, true heroes of the anti-fascist movement, to whom we owe an enormous debt of gratitude for their courage and self-sacrifice. But the story of his initial introduction into Read more
-
My time as Searchlight editor – unremitting but worth every single second
The anti-fascist magazine, Searchlight, is celebrating its 50th anniversary and to mark the occasion has produced a final, bumper, 72-page issue before it migrates completely online. It’s a fabulous read, and I urge everyone to buy it. Each of its surviving editors down through the years have written about how, and why, they became involved, Read more
-
This lazy Guardian hatchet job on a great journalist is simply a disgrace
There is a lot of discussion going on around the Guardian’s review of Margaret Renn’s biography of the journalist Paul Foot, who died 20 years ago this month. Let me declare an interest here: in the early 1980s, when I was working in my spare time for Searchlight, I worked with Paul on many occasions, Read more
-
The Music of Terezin
I’ve written before about Terezin, or Theresienstadt, the concentration camp ghetto near Prague where Czech Jews – including the cream of Jewish and Czech cultural life – were incarcerated by the Nazis before being transported to Auschwitz and death. Two years ago the BBC broadcast a day of music of Terezin from the Barbican. Fifteen Read more
-
Ilse Weber, 1903 – 1944. Poet and writer, murdered by the Nazis
This month marks the anniversary of the birth of Ilse Weber, born in January 1903, an accomplished poet, songwriter and writer sent to the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in 1942, and murdered in Auschwitz two years later.. Her eldest son, Hanus, was one of the children rescued from the Nazis by Nicholas Winton and Read more
-
Terezin – memorialised in music
Originally posted online 24 January 2022 Holocaust Memorial Day falls this week, and the BBC’s contribution, yesterday, was an extraordinary day of music at the Barbican Centre, music written in Nazi camps and wartime ghettos by Jewish composers. Most were held in Terezin, or Theresienstadt as the Nazis called it, just north of Prague in Read more
Blog posts
About Me
I’ve been an active anti-fascist since 1974, working for Searchlight magazine from 1975 till 1989. From 1983 till 1989 I was its editor and co-wrote ‘The Other Face of Terror’, with Ray Hill, the celebrated Searchlight infiltrator into the European neo-Nazi movement. After that, and for the next 20 years, I worked as an investigative journalist with ITV’s World in Action and the BBC’s Panorama. I blog about the history and practice of anti-fascism, especially in the UK.
andy bell 