After years hidden away, Oldham’s memorial to six local volunteers who died fighting fascism in the Spanish civil war has been restored to public view, marking both a victory for campaigners and a renewed tribute to the town’s proud International Brigade heritage, says ROB HARGREAVES
ON JUNE 5 1963 the Tory secretary of state for war John Profumo resigned following a sex scandal.
Profumo (who was schooled at Harrow, an elite boarding school for boys, followed by Oxford University where he became a member of the Bullingdon Club) had had a brief affair with a 19-year-old model, Christine Keeler, in 1961 who had also been involved with a naval official from the Russian embassy.
At the height of the Cold War these things mattered.
Who you ask and how you ask matter, as does why you are asking — the history of opinion polls shows they are as much about creating opinions as they are about recording them, writes socialist historian KEITH FLETT
While Hardie, MacDonald and Wilson faced down war pressure from their own Establishment, today’s leadership appears to have forgotten that opposing imperial adventures has historically defined Labour’s moral authority, writes KEITH FLETT
SETH SANDRONSKY savours a personal account of the life and thought of the great Italian revolutionary



