Friends of Carnegie

Delighted it resonated. Ruskin keeps proving that the 19th century saw our 21st century troubles coming and somehow articulated them with more clarity and moral courage than most of us manage today. #Ruskin #UntoThisLast #VictorianWisdom #StillRelevant #PoliticalEconomy

@ShawSoc Happy St Patrick's Day!

“Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven, and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse.” George Bernard Shaw . John Bull’s Other Island (1904) #BernardShaw #StPatricksDay #Ireland

Four weeks from today, 14 April brings Chris Roberts @CarnegieLib with wild and whacky tales of parks & green spaces in South London: toilet goddesses, golf riots, song old as time near Brockwell Park, stolen geese, pagan estate agents... Free, book now on eventbrite.com/e/1984794703387

@FurkanGozukara Sickening.

Terrifying reality exposed: Big Tech companies like Palantir, Google, and Amazon are using the genocide in Gaza as a testing ground to train their AI war bots. They are profiting off mass slaughter to sell autonomous killing software to militaries worldwide.

Andrew Carnegie, the original billionaire who gave spent 90% of his fortune creating over 3000 libraries worldwide because a free library was how he gained the eduction to become wealthy.

Happy 93rd birthday to South London boy Sir Michael Caine. I'm reading his autobiography (borrowed from @CarnegieLib) Blowing the Bloody Doors Off and Other Lessons in Life. Brilliant.

My comments on this article: "We live in a world where A.I. companies are grabbing every bit of writing, art and music without consent." This is the foundation on which we should judge generative AI. It does not belong to the corporations who stole our entire culture without consent. Our work, our writing, our art, our compositions, our poetry belong to us. Our right to own our own output must be the primary consideration. Our expressions, our imaginations, our deeply felt sense of being alive and gifting that to the world though our creativity should not be exploited by corporations. Creativity is what makes us human. We must fight against machine exploitation and hold on to our shared humanity and our priceless human art and writing. nytimes.com/2026/03/13/opi…

@exitthelemming I first saw Jane Lapotaire as Viola in RSC's 12th Night in 1974 & years later as Piaf + many other roles, and also read her autobiography. A fine actress & inspiring woman.

Brilliant in pretty much everything she did. Hail and farewell.

Mark your diaries for our next author event @CarnegieLib on 14 April. Chris Roberts tells wierd & wonderful tales of South London parks & green spaces. eventbrite.com/e/1984794703387 Tea & cake 6.30, talk 7pm. Free.

It has been incredibly heartening meeting so many people determined to resist the AI industry’s attempts to exploit creatives at London Book Fair this week. 10,000 authors signed our book protesting book theft by AI companies, but so many more have stopped by to show support. At an event like this, it really hits you how deep the mistrust of AI, and the support for humans, runs. London Book Fair is a slop-free zone, a glorious celebration of real human creativity. Just tens of thousands of books, and the people who work incredibly hard to bring them into the world. Power to humans. #LBF

@BigBrotherWatch Skeptical? Outraged that everyone would be turned into criminal suspects. Use traditional methods to trace & nab real criminals & leave the rest of us in privacy & peace.

⚠️Digital ID + facial recognition Snuck into the digital ID consultation is an admission that the police would be allowed to repurpose our digital ID photos as mugshots to create a population-wide facial recognition database. It is for precisely this reason that the public is rightly sceptical of a sprawling ID system that has been sold to us under various guises - whether to 'stop the boats' or improve public services - but which invariably hands more power and more of our personal information to the state, at our expense.

Thanks Kate Connelly for a brilliant presentation on Sylvia Pankhurst to a full house @CarnegieLib last night. Glad several books sold & good to see many new faces. Our next author event is 14 April, Chris Roberts with South Parks: Tales from the Southern Commons. Folklore, fun.

@lswaffield1 It was a brilliant presentation to a full house, followed by lively Q&A and book sales & signing. Many new faces in the audience enjoying the ambience of our beautiful library along with friends & neighbours. Next author event 12 April. Details follow.

Tuesday 10th Feb, 7pm FREE. Perfect for celebrating women! Meet the author of a new book about Sylvia, the socialist Pankhurst. Carnegie library, 188 Herne Hill Rd, SE24 0DG. Refreshments from 6.30pm. Friends of Carnegie Library.

@Ravilious1942 Dulwich Picture Gallery staged a super exhibition, Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious from November 2024-May 2025. It helped make her & her work better known and appreciated. Their current show to 8 May celebrates another brilliant artist unfamiliar in UK: Denmark's Anna Ancher.

On #InternationalWomensDay I wanted to once again pay tribute to Tirzah Garwood, Eric Ravilious’ wife. They met when she was a student at Eastbourne College, married Eric in 1930 & a dozen years later was a war widow. Her work continued, and she deserves to be much better known.

Tonight! Katherine Connelly presents her book on Sylvia Pankhurst @CarnegieLib 6.30 for 7-8.30. Don't miss it. Then mark diaries for 14 April when Chris Roberts invites us to South Parks: Tales from the Southern Commons. Booking details soon. All our events are free.

Happy International Women's Day 2026! We're celebrating @CarnegieLib Tues 10th, 6.30 for 7pm with Kate Connelly's PowerPoint presentation from her book on Sylvia Pankhurst. Check Friends' website or @lamlibs for booking or just come along.

@SizweLo "anti-Mossadegh protesters were paid to march demanding the Shah’s return and Mossadegh’s removal." Now they don't have to pay people; AI deepfakes made it look/sound like Iranians call for the ex-Shah's son to come. In reality, they say NO to dictators, be it Shah or Ayatollah.

By now, we all know how in 1953 the British and American governments orchestrated a campaign to remove Iran’s Prime Minister from power. What many don’t know is that long before tanks rolled through Tehran, intelligence agencies spent months systematically dismantling public trust in his government through bribed journalists and staged violence. Before the actual coup attempt in Iran 73 years ago, Britain and the USA funded Iranian media figures to shape public opinion by bribing newspaper editors and journalists to publish articles demonising the prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The Westerners also planted editorials and cartoons portraying him as corrupt, dictatorial, or pro-communist and distributed fabricated and exaggerated stories about government incompetence. The messaging aimed to convince Iranians that the prime minister was secretly cooperating with the Iran’s communist party and was becoming a dictator. The CIA explicitly described its goal as “disenchanting the Iranian population with the myth of Mossadegh’s patriotism.” Another tactic involved regime change agents pretending to be communists. This was a very powerful tool because many Iranian religious leaders strongly opposed communism, which they saw as atheist and anti-Islamic. So, if Prime Minister Mossadegh could be linked to communists, he would lose support from religious groups. So CIA and MI6 operatives carried out acts meant to look like communist intimidation by making threats against clerics and attacking mosques and religious figures. There was at least one bombing of a Muslim leader’s house staged to appear communist. The purpose was to psychologically convince clerics that communists were gaining power under Mossadegh and make them believe the government could not protect them. Beyond the media, the CIA also influenced clergy, members of parliament, street organisers and even gang leaders, all of whom were bribed to speak against Mossadegh, and organise protests. The aim here was to create the impression that Mossadegh was losing support across society. After weakening Mossadegh politically, the next phase was to create visible instability in Tehran. This involved hiring crowds and street gangs and paying demonstrators and local gang leaders to mobilise crowds into rioting and violence. Different groups were used for different purposes. “Pro-Mossadegh mobs”, who were fake supporters, were paid to riot and cause violence while claiming loyalty to Mossadegh. On the other hand, anti-Mossadegh protesters were paid to march demanding the Shah’s return and Mossadegh’s removal. This created a confusing environment where it looked like the country was collapsing into chaos where the staged demonstrations escalated into real street fighting, with thousands of people filling the streets of Tehran. CIA-supported crowds violently clashed with genuine Mossadegh supporters, members of the very popular communist Tudeh Party and with police forces. Buildings were attacked, shops were looted and religious leaders were harassed. This disorder helped create the perception that the government had lost control of the capital. The coup planners needed Iranian military officers to intervene against the prime minister. By generating instability, they hoped the army would believe the government was collapsing, the country risked falling to communists and that the Shah needed to restore order. Eventually, more and more military units moved against Prime Minister Mossadegh...and the rest is history.

@coates_tim @DcmsLibraries @fionatwycross @CILIPinfo @ace_national @lisanandy @margarethodge Pathetic

What Ruth means is - the DCMS contribution to public libraries in support of 'The National Year of Reading' is ... £50 per library. @DcmsLibraries @fionatwycross @CILIPinfo @ace_national @lisanandy @margarethodge

📷 Happy World Book Day! Stop into @CarnegieLib or your local and borrow some books, for yourself, your children, partner, etc. Read and enjoy.

If you're having trouble using the Eventbrite link for next Tuesday's author event, here is another link: tinyurl.com/mtc5jwrw