Lessons For The Swinish Multitude
What happens if you are outshone by your contemporaries? While Thomas Paine was busy changing the world, another man, also called Thomas was trying to do the same. Both men believed in Liberty at a time of American rebellion and guillotines in France. However one is held up to this day as one of the founding Fathers of the American Dream, the other only has an obsessive curator of coins in The British Museum to tell his story. The Rights of Man or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude... come on, which would you rather read?!
Ben Alsop did an excellent talk at The Z List Dead List Live show at The British Museum last year. So much so I had to have him on the podcast.
He chose a tiny man from Newcastle. Thomas Spence is also a fantastic character, one of 19 children, obsessed with education (so much so he invented a new method of reading), of living like a chat... of starting fights and creating an entirely new constitution... plus the best named magazine of all time. Pigs' Meat - Lessons for the swinish multitude.
This wasn't my only visit in the Citi Money Gallery. I was here a few months ago to interview curator Thomas Hockenhull for The British Museum Membercast. That interview was all about the free exhibition on the oxymoron that is the currency of communism. It is a fascinating episode - we go from shell currency to deliberately devaluing national currency to the future of cryptocurrency. You can listen to it right now:
It is official: Iszi is the best thing on the Radio!
In other news the jiu jitsu piece I did for Radio 4 last week was made Pick of The Week. So I'm chuffed to bits - you can catch up with all the episodes on The Making History Website. The lastest one features me doing hyperlink history investigating coprolite mines. That's right they mined for dead animal poo. There was a rush and everything!
