Brand Branson

TWENTY-THREE Australians are among the 600 people who have stumped up a cool $US200,000 each to be among the first space tourists with Virgin Galactic. The flights are expected to take place at the end of next year after Virgin test flights prove successful and the passengers undergo basic space training.

Flights on Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo will carry two pilots and six commercial passengers on a two and a half journey that will involve just six minutes of sub-orbital weightlessness 21,000m high. The idea is the latest brainwave of serial inventive British businessman Richard Branson who will be on the first scheduled flight with his family.

The entrepreneurial icon turned 62 in July but shows no sign of slowing down.

Where others see disaster, Branson sees opportunity.  CNN called him part Warren Buffett, part PT Barnum and an “unflappable inventor and promoter”.He has vast interests on six continents, including airlines, express trains, mobile phones and credit cards.

Branson was always an independent sort. Aged 16 he set up a magazine to put out a student point of view. “I didn't like the way I was being taught at school,” he said in 2006. “I didn't like what was going on in the world, and I wanted to put it right.” Plenty of advertisers were willing to stump up to reach the cashed-up youngsters reading Branson’s mag and his career was up and running.

He advertised records in the magazine and started selling them himself at a London store at discounted rates under the brand “Virgin”.In 1972 he launched Virgin Records and was approached by a struggling artist called Mike Oldfield to listen to his demo. Other companies thought Oldfield's instrumental work was unmarketable but Branson took a gamble. Oldfield’s Tubular Bells was the first record released by Virgin. The album took off after it was used as the theme music for the movie The Exorcist and by the end of 1973 it was a massive international success. Branson was always grateful to Oldfield and would later name one of his first Virgin America planes Tubular Belle.

Branson’s willingness to take a gamble paid off and he was at it again in 1976 when he signed the band the Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten and his punk crew were controversial but they knew how to shift records. Though the band broke up before Branson made serious money out of them, they successful changed Virgin's image as a hippie label. In their wake, he signed up XTC, The Skids,The Culture Club, The Human League, and Sting. Virgin’s income went from a loss of £900,000 in 1980 to a profit of £11 million in 1983. In 1992 Branson was able to sell the music label to EMI for £0.5 billion. 

By then, Branson had broadened his scope with expensive airlines in his firing line. In his autobiography Losing My Virginity he explained why. “My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them,” he said. “From the perspective of wanting to live life to the full, I felt that I had to attempt it.” Just as his assault on the expensive record industry worked, the over-regulated airline market was also ripe for picking.

His Virgin Atlantic Airways was followed by Virgin Blue in Australia in 2000. Virgin Blue took full advantage of Ansett’s collapse a year later to become the country’s second largest airline. Internationally there was Virgin Trains and Virgin Mobile and even Virgin Comics as Branson spread his net far and wide. Meanwhile there was a succession of world record attempts, film appearances and humanitarian initiatives as Branson the man competed with Branson the brand. 

He was knighted in 2000 for “services to entrepreneurship” and he now gets rock star treatment wherever he goes. Last year, stadiums in Sydney and Melbourne were filled with people who forked out $300 a ticket to attend a “financial education summit” where Sir Richard was the star speaker.

Now at an age when many are reaching for the pipe and slippers, Branson is still reaching for the skies and beyond.

100 Years On: Douglas Mawson and Australian identity forged in the Antarctic

Today, Prime Minister Gillard invoked “the spirit of Mawson” when she visited the site of the University of Tasmania’s new state-of-the-art Marine Research institute today. The site is due to open in 2014 and Gillard timed her visit on the celebrations of Douglas Mawson’s 100th anniversary as leader of Australia’s first Antarctic exhibition. Gillard said the Tasmanian facility committed Australia to the Antarctic in “a history 100 years old but with a great future in front of it.”

Leaving irony at the future of history aside, Mawson is a man well worth commemorating as a great Australian scientist and explorer. Gallipoli is commonly the moment when the newly-formed white commonwealth of Australia was supposed to be forged in battle. Certainly the number of dead that forlorn Turkish campaign caused was enough to invoke nationwide mourning, but Mawson’s earlier and less deadly adventure did much also to put a young nation on the map - and expand Australian thinking about the map and its place on it. His 100th anniversary celebrations in the Antarctic were delayed a few days due to bad weather, another irony that would not have been lost on the intrepid explorer.

Douglas Mawson like most Australians of the time (except the Irish) Mawson considered himself an Englishman. Mawson was of gritty Yorkshire stock born in Shipley in 1882. The family were cloth merchants who moved to Sydney while Douglas was still a toddler. He was educated at Rooty Hill and at Fort Street Model School. He attended the University of Sydney during the tumultuous change of century (1899-1902). While Australia federated and fought the Boer War, he studied mining engineering.

After graduating he was appointed as a junior demonstrator in chemistry at the university. He went into the field and did a six month geological survey of the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) under the island’s deputy commissioner Captain E. G. Rason. Mawson’s ‘The geology of the New Hebrides' was one of the first major works of its kind on Melanesia. Back in Australia he resumed studies in geology and was appointed lecturer in mineralogy and petrology in the University of Adelaide. It was here he became interested in glacial geology, particularly of SA. Mawson cemented his reputation by coming up with new classifications for the mineralised Precambrian rocks of the Barrier Range.

In November 1907, Ernest Shackleton met him in Adelaide. Shackleton was there as leader of the British Antarctic Expedition heading south. Shackleton wanted to be first to the South Pole, something that did not interest Mawson particularly. Yet Mawson immediately wanted to join him so he could explore the glaciations of the southern continent. Shackleton was impressed and made him physicist.

By March 1908 Mawson was on top of the volcano Mt Erebus in Antarctica, in the first group of men to climb the continent’s highest peak. While Shackleton and his team pressed onto the pole, Mawson and Edgeworth David travelled 2000km to be the first to reach the south magnetic pole. They survived the return trip despite lack of food, exhaustion and Mawson’s fall into a deep crevasse. Shackleton failed in the main exhibition and they returned to Australia chastened, but with Mawson’s reputation enhanced.

Cooling (or more likely warming) his heels back at the University of Adelaide, he heard Scott was planning another assault on the pole. Mawson asked for a ride to explore the coast west of Cape Adare. Scott refused but invited him to go to the pole with him. That did not interest Mawson so negotiations foundered. After Scott left for the south in 1910, Mawson launched his own exhibition to be called the Australasian Antarctic Expedition.

He set sail in December 1911 and made three crucial stops in the name of Australia. At Macquarie Island he established a base where they would be the first to relay radio messages from the Antarctic. Then on the continent itself, he established a Main Base at Commonwealth Bay and a Western Base on the Shackleton Ice Shelf. All three sites were dedicated to science: geology, cartography, meteorology, aurora, geomagnetism, biology and marine science.

The Base at Commonwealth Bay was ready by February 1912. Mawson went exploring in the Far East of Antarctica but both his fellow explorers died on the harsh journey. Though Mawson seriously debilitated, he cut his sledge in half, discarded everything except his geological specimens and records and dragged it 160km over 30 days to get back to Main Base. He was forced to stay the winter and continued explorations to 1913.

Back home in 1915, Mawson told his story in “The Home of the Blizzard”. It was a sensational read but a Great War meant Australian attention was preoccupied elsewhere and Mawson did not get the credit his extraordinary adventures, exploration, innovation and scientific work deserved. Mawson served in that war as embarkation officer for shipments of high explosives and poison gas from Britain to Russia.

After the war he worked for the White Russians before returning to Adelaide when the Communists won the revolution. Mawson returned to the University of Adelaide to spend 30 years researching South Australian Precambrian rocks of the Flinders Ranges. He also pored through his polar findings. He collected so much data from the trip, it took him that same 30 years to complete his "Scientific Reports", in twenty-two volumes. He led two more southern journeys for the British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition in 1929-30 and 1930-31 which were both sea-based only. His mapping work was crucial to the Australian Antarctic Territory Acceptance Act of 1933 and the Australian Antarctic Territory three years later.

Mawson retired in 1952 to Melbourne and died of a cerebral haemorrhage at his Brighton home six years later on 14 October 1958, aged 78. By then Australia’s first permanent Antarctic base was established at Holme Bay in Mac Robertson Land. The base was Mawson’s idea and after World War II he convinced foreign minister Doc Evatt to set one up. The base was founded in 1954 and named for Mawson. It was an obvious but deserved honour for a man many see as the greatest polar explorer ever. By 1984, Mawson’s reputation was secured with his place on the $100 Australian note. It was something you could put your money on: Mawson was a great Australian and a man who always put science first.

David Bowie turns 65: A personal recollection

My first memory of David Bowie is when I was a young teenager at the house of my two older cousins. They influenced my early musical tastes which meant I had an early eclectic collection that featured Mike Oldfield, Steve Hillage, Rory Gallagher and Rush. Among their albums was a strange looking LP with an unforgettable cover photo. There was a man and a woman both shown naked from the chest upwards, the man with big bright red hair staring pensively straight into the camera, while the woman, her head resting gently on his shoulder, seemed almost forlorn. The album was called “Pinups” and the artist announced as just “Bowie”. I didn’t know whether “Bowie” was him or her or both of them but desperately wanted to know more. Her face was familiar but it was his voice that transfixed me from the first listen.

Later my cousin told me he was David Bowie and she was the model Twiggy, whom I remembered seeing on television. What was she doing on the cover, I asked. He didn’t know. It would be many years before I found out why though I figured Bowie must have had a thing for Twiggy when she got name checked (“Twig the Wonder Kid”) in Drive In Saturday on the album Aladdin Sane. That album and Pinups were released within six months of each other in 1973 when I was nine years old.

It was probably around late 1978 or so when my cousins first exposed me to his work and his astonishing different coloured eyes. The following year I got my first summer job porting cases around the Grand Hotel in Tramore for ten quid a week. I stayed at my auntie’s in Tramore and for the first time in my life I had discretionary spending money. All that summer I spent my wages on David Bowie’s back collection. There was Pinups, of course and Aladdin Sane. But there were lots more besides and I immediately loved them all.

Space Oddity (1969) featured the hit single of the same name. The tune was instantly familiar from radio but I never realised it was the same guy who shared a possibly naked album cover with Twiggy. There was The Man Who Sold the World (1971) full of raucous rocking anthems and the album that Roy Carr and Charles Murray later told me in their “Bowie: An Illustrated Record” (1981) was where the Bowie story really began. The cover art of Bowie in a dress was too much for 1970s Catholic Ireland (as it was for less conservative Britain) and we all had to make do with the “leg up” photo from the Ziggy era.

Hunky Dory (1971) quickly established itself as a personal favourite. While cycling in the countryside near Waterford I would sing loudly each song in the order they appeared on the album, much to the bemusement of the cows in the nearby fields who had to put up with my squealing out every previous moment of “Oh You Pretty Things". It was pure pop, Bowie style and I loved every minute of it. I'm not sure the cows shared my tastes.

Next up was Ziggy Stardust (1972). While this was the album – and the persona – that made Bowie a household name, it was never one I particularly loved. I thought the concept album idea was boring and none of the songs haunted their way into my conscience as did his other albums of the same era. I did like the instruction on the cover “To be played at maximum volume” but I never risked the wrath of mum and dad by actually complying.

As stated before the 1973 albums were my entry point to Bowie. Not until I read Carr & Murray, did I realise Pinups was full of 1960s covers and even recently when I heard Ray Davies blast out “Where Have All the Good Times Gone?” my first reaction was to think the Kinks did a great cover of Bowie’s record. Aladdin Sane, however, was pure Bowie and utterly haunting from the first listen. I was entranced by Bowie’s apocalyptic vision from the subtitle of the title song Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?) expecting World War III to break out any day. But it was Mike Garson’s piano in the final track Lady Grinning Soul that penetrated deepest with Bowie crooning “She will be your living end” grinning its way into my soul. It’s still my all time favourite Bowie song.

Then it was Diamond Dogs from 1974, another overrated album by my lights. I was never a huge fan of the singles Rebel, Rebel or Diamond Dogs though I loved the epic sweep of the Sweet Thing trilogy. Young Americans from 1975 was much more to my liking. Very different from anything Bowie did before, his “plastic soul” sounded anything but plastic and the influence of John Lennon still in his prime and Luther Vandross made this a very classy sounding album. Bowie’s voice seemed to adapt to any style.

Station to Station (1976) was another departure and another Bowie character the vampire-like Thin White Duke. Bowie was a heavy cocaine user during this period and it drives on the pulsating title track that opens the album. The opening minutes of that song are unforgettable as the train build up speed slowly with a droning guitar before the thin white Duke’s voice returns to bring this massive song home with an up tempo conclusion. Well, if it's not the side-effects of the cocaine, I'm thinking that it must be love.

It took me a while to love the two 1977 albums Low and Heroes. By then Bowie was in Berlin and under the influence of ambient musician Brian Eno. Low was well named, the pain of Bowie’s then splintered personal life brought out in songs like Breaking Glass and Always Crashing in the Same Car. The instrumental side 2 was difficult listening but ultimately rewarding. Heroes followed a similar trajectory with side one distilling in lyrics Bowie’s drug-crazed agonies while an instrumental side two seemed to explore the same concepts in music.

Lodger (1979) came out in the same year I was seriously getting into Bowie. It was a bit more upbeat than the previous two and was minus the instrumental frenzies but it was still a dark record. Boys Keep Swinging got Bowie back in the British charts but there was not much singles joy in this platter. The title Lodger hinted Bowie was not really at home in this music but his travels around world music did give him a better feel for dance music he would exploit successfully in the coming years.

That decade started with Scary Monsters and Super Creeps which was the first Bowie album I bought as soon as it came out. I was a bit disappointed. The album was a commercial successful and the singles Ashes to Ashes and Fashion put him at the top of the charts. Yet somehow I was expecting a bit more from Bowie. It was another change of musical philosophy for sure, but it just seemed to fall short. Maybe I was just being precious because everyone liked Bowie at the time. Listening again to It's No Game (Part 1) recently, it is a classic track with Michi Hirota singing the song in Japanese and Bowie spitting out the translation in English as if, as Carr & Murray said he was “tearing out his intestines”.

My love affair with Bowie ended in 1983 with Let’s Dance. Sooner or later Bowie would have to release a disco record and this was it, and a great success. But by 1983 I was a know-all 18 and starting to get into more obscure music, listening to Wire, the Virgin Prunes and the young Matt Johnson (later The The). I was unimpressed by Bowie’s clean dance sounds on this album. The title track was playing in every discotheque in the world that summer and I loathed it like I loathed Thriller which came out around the same time. This music was beneath me and I didn’t buy another Bowie record for 20 years.

Around 2005, there was a time when all his back collection of CDs was selling at $10 a pop in Brisbane record stores. In a fit of nostalgia I bought all those albums from 1970 to 1983. I fell in love with his early music again. Too much time had passed under the bridge for me to care about more recent Bowie offerings. I bought Heathen (2002) but because it had no 1970s or 1980s memories to weave on to, it never impinged on my conscience and I’ve hardly ever played it. But for those 13 years or so, Bowie’s voice, dexterity and mastery of various genres made him a musical genius of the highest order. Happy 65th birthday, David.

Ada Lovelace

Today, 24 March, is Ada Lovelace day; an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. And who better to write about than Ada Lovelace herself, a 19th century woman who vies with Grace Hopper as one of the great female pioneers of computing.

Lovelace was born Augusta Ada Byron in 1815, the daughter of Lady Annabella Byron and the British Romantic poet Lord Byron. Ada never knew her “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” father (the description given to him by his lover Caroline Lamb). The impetuous Byron and the logical Annabella were an ill-matched couple. He called her the Princess of Parallelograms and they parted on bad terms. He died in Greece in 1824 when his only daughter was just eight years old.

By then it was clear that Ada was extraordinarily talented. She could solve difficult maths problems and was intrigued by numbers, equations and calculations. She was also fascinated by the mystery of flight and was determined to create a set of human wings in an involved process she called “Flyology”. Her worried mother invited three unmarried female friends to live with them in Mortlake hoping they would be a good influence on her brilliant but wayward daughter. But Ada hated the three chaperones as interfering busybodies and spies who watched her every move.

The first love of her life was William Turner who was employed to teach her shorthand. Ada was now 16 and just two years younger than her new tutor. They got along well despite the overbearing chaperones and she accepted William’s proposal of marriage. The pair eloped but were quickly caught. William was banished from the house and never seen again. Ada decided that from then on she would keep her love for numbers.

Aged 18, she was introduced to Charles Babbage at his house in London’s Dorset St. She was among a crowd of visitors to see the inventor’s latest creation the Silver Dancer. The Dancer was a lifelike clockwork toy which did a never-ending cycle of pirouettes. Young Ada was fascinated by the Dancer and wanted to know more about its strange creator.

Babbage was the original nutty professor. He had invented shoes that could walk on water, a method of delivering messages by overhead cable, a machine that played noughts and crosses, a means of checking the condition of railway tracks and lights to enable communications bete ween land and sea. But his lasting claim to fame was the Difference Engine. After being entranced by the Silver Dancer, Ada then spotted the Engine which was the size of a large trunk and resembled a giant clock. It contained hundreds of cogs and wheels which were numbered from 0 to 9. Ada labelled it the Thinking Machine.

The Engine was incomplete and Babbage never finished it in his lifetime. But he did show Ada how it worked and soon it was spitting out numbers 8,10,12,14 and so on, each time adding 2. Babbage and Ada quickly struck up a partnership and she signed on to help him build the next stage: an analytical engine. She spent two years making the necessary calculations and solving complex problems for the prototype of what was the world’s first computer. But Babbage could not afford the tubes needed to complete it.

Aged 20, she met and married a Warwickshire man Lord King who was also known as William Lovelace. They had three children: George, Annabella and Ralph. But Ada was not a great mother. She became ill unable to eat or sleep. But she continued to work with Babbage. The inventor had adapted the punched cards used by Jacquard, the French silk weaver. The cards would be used to feed in the information to the Engine to make the calculations. It would be Ada’s job to describe how the Thinking Machine would work based on the translations of the Italian philosopher Luigi Menabrea. After two years she published “Menabrea: Sketch of the Analytical Engine”.

The book was an immediate sensation and Ada became as famous as her late father. She was 28 and at the height of her powers. But illness and death were not far away. She suffered bad stomach cramps and headaches and made it worse by a dubious magnetism cure. In 1851, a uterine examination revealed “a very deep and extensive ulceration of the womb”. She died a year later of cancer, aged 36. But her legacy to the computer would live long after her.

In May 1979, Commander John D. Cooper came up with a name which the US Department of Defence’s High Order Language Working Group (HOLWG) could accept for their new programming language: It was to be called “Ada”. HOLWG contacted Ada’s descendent Lord Lytton for permission to use the name. Lytton was enthusiastic and pointed out that the letters “Ada” stood “right in the middle of radar”.

John Mitchel

On Monday, Dave Beckerman’s wonderfully evocative “Black and White Photography blog” featured a memorial bust of John Purroy Mitchel, New York’s youngest ever mayor. Mitchel was mayor from 1914 to 1917 and was just 34 when he got the job and with it the title of “The Boy Mayor of New York”. The boy mayor died bizarrely just a year after losing office when as an World War I Army Air service cadet, he forgot to fasten his airplane seatbelt and plummeted 150 meters to the ground. Mitchel Field air base in Long Island was named in his honour adding to his family’s illustrious legend.

John Purroy Mitchel’s grandfather was John Mitchel, a complex and hugely influential Irish patriot known also for his time in Australia and the US. Mitchel was an Ulster Presbyterian, a lawyer, and a fiery and passionate journalist, who wrote about the artificial famine that was devastating Ireland in the late 1840s. Mitchel laid the blame squarely on British economic policies.

In the nationalist newspaper The Nation, Mitchel wrote that the famine was not a natural disaster but a deliberate attempt to exterminate the Irish peasantry. In his view, British politicians were using famine to clear Ireland's 'surplus population' from the land in order to use it to feed Britain's growing industrial population. Britain was, he said, obsessed by the pursuit of profit and the callous doctrines of political economy, and blind to the sufferings of the Irish people.

His radical writing caused immense debate even among Mitchel’s own fellow Young Irelanders. The Nation’s editor Charles Gavan Duffy censored his writing and Mitchel left to found his own paper “The United Irishman”. Free to write whatever he wanted, Mitchel did not mince his words. He announced the purpose of the paper was to wage “Holy War to sweep this Island clear of the English name and nation.” The violent revolutionary tone caused a sensation. The British authorities immediately saw it as seditious and Mitchel was a marked man.

Mitchel got away with producing 16 incendiary issues in a similar vein. But on 22 April 1848, Westminster passed a bill specifically with Mitchel in mind. And so barely a month later he was arrested under the newly minted Treason Felony Act (an act which remains in force today) and sent to Dublin’s Newgate prison. The authorities deliberately packed a jury against him and found him guilty. The judge sentenced him to fourteen years transportation. Mitchel's dignified bearing and the severity of the sentence won him considerable sympathy from nationalists, and contributed to the Young Irelanders' decision to mount an unsuccessful "cabbage patch" rebellion in July 1848.

But Mitchel himself had already left the cabbage patch by then. He set sail from Cobh and spent the first year of his exile on the prison hulk Dromedary off the coast of Bermuda. Mitchel noted with sardonic delight the name of the British Bermudan base: Ireland Island. But the island’s humidity was unlike Ireland's and it played havoc with Mitchel’s asthma. He was sent on to Cape Town on board the Neptune in 1849. There he enjoyed the discomfit of his British captors who were not allowed to land their convict stock on South African soil. After several months, the Neptune set sail for Tasmania.

Mitchel documented his time in Bermuda, South Africa and Australia in his most famous work, the “Jail Journal”. On 6 April 1850, the long journey across the roaring forties neared its end as a delighted Mitchel could see the “mountainous southern coast of Van Diemen’s Land. They docked at Hobart a day later. Mitchel was treated as a VIP prisoner and was allowed a “ticket of leave” to live at Bothwell with his old school friend who had also been transported a year earlier. Through Martin, he met other transported dissident Young Irelanders including Thomas Francis Meagher and William Smith O'Brien who all congregated around Lake Sorell.

Mitchel was joined by his wife and family at Nant Cottage in Bothwell. There they ran sheep and reminisced the old times in Ireland. But Mitchel had too revolutionary a mind to settle for being a Tasmanian gentleman. In 1853 he donned a series of disguises and smuggled himself on board the Emma, a passenger-brig bound for Sydney. After an agonising week in hiding in Sydney, he boarded the Orkney Lass for the trip to Honolulu. After three weeks at sea, they landed at Tahiti. There he transferred to the US ship Julia Ann where his wife and family were already aboard. Finally on board an American vessel, Mitchel was able to drop his disguise. At 7pm on the 13th September 1853, he wrote “my Jail Journal ends, and my out-of-jail Journal begins”.

He arrived in New York to a hero’s welcome and lost little time in getting back to journalism. In the weekly Citizen, he serialised his Jail Journal. He dabbled in intrigue with the Russian ambassador during the Crimean War asking him to aid the Irish independence cause. But his blind spot would prove to be his racism. Mitchel believed blacks were racially inferior and were better off as plantation slaves than living in barbarism in Africa.

As the 1850s progressed, he grew to detest the abolitionist cause. He moved to Tennessee and bought a farm while supplementing his income with lecture tours. In 1859 he set sail for France and was there when war broke out in the States. His two sons joined the Confederate Army and Mitchel returned to be with them. Mitchel himself served with an ambulance corps and became editor of the Richmond Daily Enquirer. But as the war went badly, he became increasingly disillusioned with the confederate president, Jefferson Davis.

After the war, Mitchel went back to New York and then France where he tried to rouse another army to invade Ireland. When that failed, Mitchel turned back to journalism in New York as well as writing Irish history. In 1875 he finally returned to Ireland as an old and ill man to contest a by-election in Tipperary. Although easily elected, Parliament declared him ineligible as an undischarged felon. Mitchel stood again and won convincingly. But Mitchel spared Britain a constitutional crisis. He died, aged 59, on 20 March 1875 and was buried in his parents' grave in the Unitarian cemetery in Newry, Co Down. His New York fire marshal son James fathered John Purroy Mitchel which takes us back to where we started. The Mitchel flame lived on in the boy mayor. Shame about the seatbelt, though.

Picasso and his collection at Brisbane’s GOMA

Police in Sao Paulo have recovered a Picasso painting stolen two months ago by armed robbers. The 1933 painting "Minotaur, Drinker and Women" was found wrapped in paper in a woods by the side of a highway near Brazil’s largest city. Police say it was abandoned there by thieves who stole another Picasso and two other paintings from the city’s Pinacoteca Museum. All four paintings, with an estimated value of $630,000, have now been recovered.

Nothing quite so dramatic in Brisbane’s art show dedicated to Picasso, but an enjoyable exhibition here nonetheless, at the city’s stunning Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA). “Picasso and his Collection” is an exhibition of his personal art collection showing at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) from 9 June to 14 September. GoMA is the first venue outside Europe to host the collection. The exhibition features 80 of the artist's own works interspersed with over 100 works from other artists in his extraordinary private collection.

Pablo Picasso is probably one of the greatest painters of the 20th century and certainly one of the most inventive. From the time he moved to Paris in 1900, aged 19 to his death 73 long years later, he explored every imaginable style from realistic to abstract. He worked in many mediums including paintings, drawings, sculptures in stone, bronze, wood, and printmaking. He invented the collage technique, co-founded Cubism and was one of the pioneers of Surrealism.

He was born 1881 in Malaga with the improbable name of Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso. Ruiz was his father’s name; Picasso his mother’s. The other names honoured various family members and saints in traditional Spanish fashion. His father José Ruiz y Blasco was a well known painter in his own right and an art teacher who instilled a love of classic art in his son. After studying art in Barcelona, the young Pablo went to Paris, where he was befriended by the poet Max Jacob. The pair shared a tiny apartment, Jacob slept in the single bed by night and Picasso slept by day.

Gradually, Paris transformed Picasso and his painting. Through Jacob he got to know most the great cultural figures of the city and through exhibitions at the salon des independents he got to know most of its art. Picasso would prove to be a great collector of art too and he inherited his father’s love of the old masters, in particular the 19th century realist paintings of Louis Le Nain, Jean-Baptiste Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot.

Picasso loved their primitiveness and called their works “pure painting”. He painted “Returning from the Christening (after Le Nain)” in pointillist style in Le Nain’s honour. He acquired Gustave Courbet’s “Head of a Chamois” which turned its subject matter into a minotaur and then recreated the moment in his own visceral 1952 painting “Goats Skull, bottle and candle”. Picasso was also deeply affected by the realist paintings of Henri Rousseau which in turn inspired many in Picasso’s own set. Juan Miro said “it was at Picasso’s place I first saw a Rousseau”.

As well as the realist masters, Picasso loved the works of Gauguin, Degas, Cezanne and Renoir. He saw all their works as they were displayed in Paris. Once again, it was the primitivism of Gauguin that captured Picasso’s imagination. He was also deeply influenced by Gauguin's Tahitian diary Noa Noa. Picasso was no great fan of the impressionists but when Gauguin, Degas and others disassociated themselves from the movement, they were seen as providing the origins of the modernist movement.

This movement was all around Picasso. His poet friend Guillaume Apollinaire decried impressionism and said it was time “for an art that is nobler, bettered ordered and more cultivated”. Picasso himself also admired Cezanne and Renoir as “dissidents of impressionism” and he called himself “the grandson of Cezanne”. Meanwhile Renoir’s fleshy nudes were art in a classical vein free of any dry formalism. These paintings inspired Picasso’s 1920s “large bathers” series.

Picasso first collaborated with George Braque in 1907. Picasso had by then become intrigued by African and Polynesian art forms and was starting to build up his own collection of masks, drums and totems. As well, Cezanne’s later work began to break up the painted surface into small multifaceted areas of paint. Together, Picasso and Braque began to paint objects in broken-up and abstract forms flattened into geometric forms viewed from different angles showing “all sides at once”. Cubism was born. The pair worked on each others paintings and were fascinated by the idea of anonymous art. When Picasso designed the costumes, masks and sets for the 1920 Stravinsky ballet Pulcinella, the masks were modelled on the Mukuyi masks from Gabon in his personal collection.

It was Apollinaire again who coined the term surrealism in 1917 to describe Jean Cocteau's ballet Parade and his own play The Mammaries of Tiresias. Picasso quickly became enamoured of the new word and its possibilities. “I’m interested in a deeper level of resemblance, more real than reality, which reaches the level of surreal,” he said. Picasso participated in the surrealist painters’ first exhibition at the Galerie Pierre in 1925 alongside Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, Hans Arp and Paul Klee. However he refused to affiliate himself with the movement, always preferring to be, as Victor Brauner put it in 1953, "a great initiator".

Throughout his artistic life, Picasso had a great friendship and rivalry with Henri Matisse. Their meeting in 1906 marked the beginning of a relationship based on reciprocal admiration and a creative rivalry. Gertrude Stein said they both showed “great enthusiasm for the other, without actually liking each other much”. Both men were inspired on to further greatness by the works of the other but neither deigned to copy. As Picasso said “a painter’s studio must be a laboratory. It is not about aping but about invention. Painting is done in the mind”. The GoMA exhibition ends with Picasso’s Le Vieil homme assis (the seated old man) 1970–71, a disguised self-portrait of which the brilliant colours speak in memory of Matisse. As he neared his own death he could confidently state “No-one has ever looked at Matisse’s painting as closely as I have”.

Half century Madonna: La Ciccone kicks on

“Some boys kiss me, some boys miss me
I think they’re ok
But it’s the boy with the cold hard cash
Who makes my rainy day”
(“Material girl” 1985).

Madonna Louise Ciccone Ritchie turned 50 yesterday. Though she celebrated her birthday with a private party in the UK, Madonna shows little sign of letting up. The pop icon will kick off her “Sticky & Sweet” world tour with the first of more than 40 dates next Saturday in Cardiff. Her most recent album “Hard Candy” (which featured collaborations with Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, Pharrell Williams, and Kanye West) debuted at number one in the UK albums chart, but was panned as mediocre by many reviewers including Pitchfork who said no-one involved in the project “is anywhere near their creative peak.”

Having sold 120 million albums and 40 million singles, Madonna can well afford to ignore the occasional poor review. Despite being the second top selling female artist of all time (only Barbra Streisand is ahead of her), it is likely she would perhaps now prefer to be known as much for her HIV activism, clothing line, children’s books, and acting and directing career. Madonna’s success over 25 years is based a refusal to rest on her laurels and the uncanny ability to periodically re-invent herself anew in a way that consistently connects with mass audiences.

She was born Madonna Louise Ciccone on 16 August 1958 in the small town of Bay City on Michigan’s Lake Huron. She was named for her mother Madonna Louise Fortin, of French-Canadian descent. Madonna snr married Silvio “Tony” Ciccone. Ciccone’s parents moved to the US from Italy's Abruzzi region in the 1920s to work in Pittsburgh’s steel mills. Ciccone was upwardly mobile and studied engineering at college. He moved to Detroit to work in the automotive industry and also served in the military. Madonna, the third of six children and the eldest daughter, would get much of her own ambition from her father.

Silvio ensured his children were brought up as Catholics and learned how to play a musical instrument. Tragedy struck when her mother died when Madonna was just six. Tony married his housekeeper and had two more children with her. After high school, Madonna won a dance scholarship to the University of Michigan. She left after a year and moved to New York. Madonna drifted from job to job, including serving donuts and nude modelling, until she joined the Alvin Ailey Dance Company.

After a couple of years learning the dance trade, she went to Europe in answer to French disco artist Patrick Hernandez's offer that she work as a back-up singer and dancer. In Paris she met Dan Gilroy who became her boyfriend and taught her how to play the guitar and drums. When the couple returned to New York, they put together the band, The Breakfast Club, where she played drums, wrote songs and sang. In 1980 she teamed up with Steve Bray to form the band Emmy and was eventually signed up as solo artist to the record label Sire.

In 1982 she recorded “Everybody” which was a club hit in the US. A year later she crossed over into mainstream pop when she worked with New York DJ John “Jellybean” Benitez. The pair struck up an important relationship, both personally and professionally. Together they released “Holiday” and “Borderline” and Madonna was on her way to becoming a star. The first three hits would appear on her eponymous debut album released in 1983.

Madonna released her second album, “Like A Virgin” in 1984, with the title track hitting the number one spot on the music charts. She was quickly renowned for her fashion as much as her music with her signature look of bleached hair, lace tops and short skirts over capri pants. As VintageBlues puts it, she “burst onto the scene clad in yards of lace, beads, crosses and the infamous Boy Toy belt, singing about such taboos as virginity and unwed mothers.”

But Madonna wasn't just content with being a star of music and fashion. A year later, in 1985, she made her first forays into the movie business. She landed her debut role as a nightclub singer in Vision Quest and followed it up as the lead in Desperately Seeking Susan. The singles from both of the films became hits and the filmmakers renamed Vision Quest in its European release to cash in on Madonna’s hit “Crazy for You”.

By then, the world was crazy for Madonna. Her third album “True Blue” took her into unprecedented territory being a smash hit with four top five single and also garnering critical acclaim. Madonna had a hand in writing or co-writing all songs on the album. It didn’t hurt album sales that “Papa Don’t Preach” caused huge controversy with its music video depicting a pregnant young teenage mother. Madonna dedicated the album to new husband actor Sean Penn whom she called in the liner notes “the coolest guy in the universe”. But Penn’s penchant for violence wasn’t so cool and the pair split up after he was charged with felony domestic assault.

Nevertheless, Madonna’s career continued to go from strength to strength. She riffed on her failed marriage in her fourth album “Like a Prayer.” It was hailed by Rolling Stone as “far and away the most self-consciously serious album she's made” and “more interested in exorcising demons than entertaining fans.” But the fans were entertained all the same, and the album sold seven million copies worldwide.

Her ability to subvert dominant gender codes to assert her own power and agency proved too much for many male-dominated organisations. In 1990, MTV banned the bondage-themed video for “Justify My Love” as being too sexually explicit. That same year, Pope John Paul II called on Romans to boycott Madonna’s “Blond Ambition” show. This was the tour that introduced Jean-Paul Gaultier's conical bra outfit and featured the singer simulating masturbation during Like a Virgin. The Vatican's newspaper, L'osservatore Romano, described the show as "a complete disgrace". Officials in Toronto also threatened to arrest her for her on-stage masturbation routine.

Madonna continued to make hit records in the 1990s, though she did not quite match the phenomenal success rate of the previous decade. In 1996, she underwent a serious image makeover when she was cast in the coveted role of Evita Peron in Alan Parker’s adaptation of the Lloyd Webber and Rice musical “Evita”. While the film was criticised for failing to accurately portray the Argentinean leader, Madonna was praised for her assured performance. The New York Times said her performance “which consists of cutting a glamorous swath through crowded settings and passionately feigning the emotions on the soundtrack, is legitimately stellar and full of fire.”

In real life, Madonna’s fire was taken on more spiritual dimensions. In a candid and wide ranging review of her career with Larry King in 1999, Madonna talked about her links with the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabala. Madonna first got into Kabala through a Jewish friend when she was heavily pregnant. Madonna hinted to King why she was attracted to it “It is considered traditionally the only people that are supposed to learn the Kabala are men, and they have to be over the age of 42,” she said. “Look, if this information is so enlightening and so important and can help other people, why are we limiting it to teaching it just to men, Jewish men who are passed the age of 42?”

Madonna herself passed the age of 42 as the new century approached. She celebrated Y2K by remarrying, this time to British film director Guy Ritchie whom she met through Sting. Ritchie became the step-father of Madonna’s daughter Lourdes who was born in 1996, and whose father was Madonna’s personal trainer Carlos Leon. Madonna and Ritchie’s attempt to adopt Malawian boy David Banda in 2006 was the subject of much controversy over allegations that the couple breached local adoption laws. There was also the accusation the boy's biological father merely thought he was being sent out for fostering. Madonna claimed it was an act of charity to “help one child escape an extreme life of…poverty”. However, academic Yvonne Roberts was one of many to question the move, saying Banda had become a public relations vehicle before he even learned to walk.

Meanwhile back in the recording studio, Madonna continued to pump out hit records showing little sign of slowing up. Her reputation as a shrewd businesswoman was recently enhanced when she severed ties with long-term record label Warner Brothers to sign up with Live Nation, a company that until recently specialised in music tours. As well as earning a reported $120 million over the life of the agreement, Madonna appears to be among the first to recognise which way the music industry was heading, meaning she will spend more time performing on stage rather than in the recording studio. And if the Rolling Stones are anything to go by, Madonna will be gracing the venues of the world for some time to come.

Obamania: the making of a black president

Campaigning in Florida, Barack Obama refused to label John McCain’s new attack ads as racist, instead calling them cynical. McCain’s ad released earlier this week focussed on Obama’s celebrity status in Europe and compared him to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. The ad got heavy airplay on the Internet and broadcast media. And as McCain struggles to get traction in opinion polls, there is little doubt that Obama’s background will play in an increasingly important in the campaign still to come.

There is also little doubt that Obama is the most “exotic” presidential candidate in living memory. Obama’s father, also called Barack Obama, was a Kenyan of the Luo tribe, born on the shores of Lake Victoria in the village of Alego. Obama senior was the son of a goat herder and attended the local school set up under the British colonial administration. The name Barack means “blessed” and the young man certainly seemed to live up to his name as he won a scholarship to study in Nairobi. On the eve of Kenyan independence, he was selected to study at a US university. In 1959, aged 23, he became the University of Hawaii’s first African student and emerged three years later top of the class with a degree in econometrics.

In a Russian language class at university, he met a shy 18 year-old American girl and they fell in love. The couple married and had a son Barack junior. But then Barack Obama snr won another scholarship to do a Ph D at Harvard. He was unable to take his young family with him. The separation became permanent as Obama went back to his native Kenya to fulfil his promise in the young black nation. Barack junior was just two years and he would see his father just once again in his life.

Obama’s mother Stanley Anne Dunham sought a divorce and stayed on in Hawaii with her son. She eventually met another foreign exchange student, Lolo Soetoro, an army geologist from Indonesia. Stanley Anne married Lolo and she followed him back to Djakarta with her young son a year after the brutal overthrow of the Sukarno regime. Under Lolo’s tutelage, young Barack learned the Indonesian language and the art of boxing. His local education was supplemented by a US correspondence course while his mother kept up his English lessons.

Stanley Anne decided it was time for her 10 year-old son to attend an American school. She sent Barack back to Hawaii to live with her parents. He was enrolled into the Punahou Academy, an elite school which traced its heritage to 1841 when it was started by missionaries. Meanwhile Barack’s mother had separated from Lolo and returned to Hawaii to pursue a master’s degree in anthropology. It was here also that Barack’s father paid him his one and only visit for a month. Barack snr returned to Kenya and was eventually killed in a car crash in 1982.

As a teenager, Barack Obama junior discovered black literature and began to read the works of Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Wright and DuBois. In his autobiography of his early years “Dreams from my Father”, Obama described these writers as “exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels”. Only Malcolm X’s biography appeared to offer a more positive message. The young Obama was impressed by his “repeated acts of self-creation” and was haunted by the similarities of their bloodline and the need to “expunge” his white heritage.

After high school, he moved to Los Angeles where he enrolled as “Barry Obama” at Occidental College near Pasadena. Here he fell in among the college’s large black population which was heavily politicised in an era when Ronald Reagan was about to inherit the US presidency. Obama joined a campaign to persuade African National Congress representatives to speak on campus. It quickly became apparent the young man was articulate and an excellent organiser.

But after two years, Obama had tired of L.A. When Barack learned about a transfer program with New York’s Columbia University, he quickly applied. Obama finished his studies here and emerged from Columbia clutching a degree in political science. In 1983 he decided his future lay in community organisation. In his own words he wanted to “organise black folks. At the grass roots. For change”. After applying to every civil rights organisation he could think of, he was eventually accepted by a consulting house on multinational corporations as a research assistant. He found the work boring and lasted only a few months. Obama drifted from job to job between being unemployed and broke.

In 1985, he was hired by an old friend Gerald Kellman (known as "Marty Kaufman" in Dreams of my Father) to come to Chicago to organise poor blacks save their manufacturing jobs. Although the city had a black mayor in Harold Washington, Chicago had the reputation of being the most segregated city in the US. With Kellman’s help, Obama began organising for a group called the Developing Communities Project (DCP) which was a church support group for blacks who were being squeezed out of their blue collar jobs and entitlements.

Obama started to interview his new constituents and began to understand their problems with unemployment, poor housing, police harassment and racism. He spoke to church groups and urged co-operation and the restoration of pride into battered communities. Obama recruited a team to help the DCP spread a message of hope. He found an issue he could tackle – the lack of training programs in the black suburbs – and formed alliances with local leaders, and lobbied the Chambers of Commerce and the Mayor’s office.

Gradually, Obama’s tireless energy turned the DCP into a superior lobbying organisation. His staff grew as more money entered the coffers and he was gaining a sense of political awareness. As well as setting up job programs, Obama started education programs for poor blacks and organised the tenants' rights group in the slum asbestos-ridden project of Altgeld Gardens. Here also he met the Reverend Jeremiah Wright who had similar ideas on community regeneration. Wright would become his mentor, marriage celebrant and a valued friend (until his comments in this year’s election campaign attracted the wrath of the right-wing media).

Barack Obama’s life-changing experience was his five-week visit to Kenya in 1988. There he met his father’s family including his own half brothers and sisters. He learned about his father’s role in KANU, the party run by the first Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta. Obama came away optimistic and convinced that the ties that bind wound prevail over expedience and greed. Crucially he also shed his belief in the importance of colour. On his return to the US, Obama went on to Harvard Law School where his glittering career really took off. He became president of the Law Review, published his memoir and taught law in Chicago. His election to the Illinois Senate in 1996 began a political career that, attack ads notwithstanding, appears to be taking him to the White House in November. As he wrote in “Dreams”, Obama still has the look of someone “mildly bewildered by the attention, and constantly aware of the gulf between the hard sheen of media reports and the messy, mundane realities of life as it is truly lived."

Arrangement in Grey and Black: the metamorphosis of Whistler’s Mother

The work colloquially known as “Whistler’s Mother” is among those few famous paintings such as the Mona Lisa and American Gothic which have transcended art and entered popular culture. The painting was in the news last week, as it always is at this time of year, in celebration of Mothers Day. The Musée d'Orsay painting featured on the first US stamp to commemorate the day in 1934. The woman that did most to make the day a celebration – Anna Jarvis (ironically never a mother herself) – was furious that the US postal service chose the Whistler painting to honour the day without consulting her.

But while Jarvis may have been unhappy, mainstream America was not. There was little doubt in most people’s eyes that the austere portrait of Anna McNeill Whistler by her son James was the quintessential picture of motherhood. What is less well known is the controversy the painting stirred up when it was painted in 1871. And its apparent conservative nature seems a bizarrely uncharacteristic work. Whistler was of one of the 19th century’s most unorthodox painters and was a leading proponent of the bohemian credo “l’art pour l’art” (art for art’s sake) that divorces art from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function.

Much of the controversy raged over the paintings name. While it is commonly now known as “Whistler’s Mother”, the actual title of the painting is “Arrangement in Grey and Black”. When Whistler tried to display the painting in 1872 at London’s 104th Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Art, the art world was horrified. The Victorian guardians of the Royal Academy could not cope with a painting of a person, especially a mother, described as a mere “arrangement”. Threatened with expulsion from the exhibition, Whistler compromised and added a subtitle: “The Artist’s Mother”.

This most American icon has never lived in the US, though it has toured several times. Its life mirrored that of its American creator who spent most of his life in Europe. James Abbott McNeill Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1834, the son of a railway engineer. When his father, George Washington Whistler, moved to St Petersburg to work on the Russian railway, his son enrolled at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts where he learned French. He finished his education at West Point and worked briefly as a coastal surveyor etching maps. But he found American society too restrictive for his worldly sensibilities. He moved to Paris where he finished his art education at the Ecole Impériale et Spéciale de Dessin, before entering the Académie Gleyre.

Whistler was a flamboyant dandyish presence in Paris wearing a straw hat, a white suit, highly polished black patent leather shoes and a monocle. Here he also gained an appreciation of Asian (especially Japanese) art and mixed with prominent artists such as Courbet, Manet and Degas. The circles in which he moved can be gauged from Fantin-Latour's Homage to Delacroix, in which Whistler is portrayed alongside Baudelaire, Manet, and others. Camille Pisarro acknowledged the young man’s talent saying "this American is a great artist.”

But not everyone in Parisian society recognised this immediately. Whistler achieved international notoriety when Symphony No. 1, The White Girl was rejected at both the Royal Academy and the Salon, but it became a major attraction at the famous Salon des Refusés (“exhibition of rejects”) in 1863. The title of his painting also alluded to Whistler’s lifelong habit of calling painting by musical titles such as symphonies, nocturnes and arrangements. Whistler’s explanation was that “as music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, the subject matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or colour."

Whistler moved to London in 1859 where he continued his bohemian lifestyle and prolific painting. His etchings of the Thames won him great acclaim. He flouted Victorian conventions and lived with his model Joanna Heffernan. His life was turned upside down in 1863 when he received a letter from his mother Anna in civil war-ravaged America saying she was moving to London to be with her son. James turned his ramshackle apartment upside down to make it respectable and evicted Joanna. Anna would now rule the entire household except for her son’s studio.

Anna did not always approve of her son's relaxed lifestyle, but she took an active interest in his painting. Her appearance in her son’s most famous painting was a happy accident. His original model was ill and unable to show up so James demanded that his mother pose for him. The original plan was for her to stand, but her aged body was unable to cope so they decided to use a chair instead. Whistler’s inspiration was to face his mother away from the viewer’s gaze. In his startlingly bare “arrangement”, Whistler succeeded in conveying his mother’s strong Protestant character in the sombre pose, expression and colouring.

The picture proved to be an immediate sensation at the London exhibition. Viewers might have been shocked at this artist’s daring depiction of his mother as an arrangement but no one could doubt the painting’s power. Whistler kept the painting for several years before selling it to the French state. It was displayed in Paris' Musée du Luxembourg in 1891 and was exhibited in several museums until it found a permanent home in the new Musée d'Orsay in 1986.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that the picture took off as an icon for motherhood, parental affection, and "family values". The picture toured America in 1932 during the height of the depression. Anna McNeill’s Whistler’s stern visage struck a chord with ordinary Americans and her values seemed in tune with the times. Within two years, its status as a maternal symbol saw it recognised in the stamp (though some were outraged at the bowdlerised addition of the bowl of flowers absent from the painting itself.

In modern times, the painting retains a power even if poor old Anna herself has been ridiculed in countless modern situationist adaptations. While her stern visage is seriously dated and no longer an appropriate symbol for all that is good in motherhood, the stark power of Whistler’s art still shines through and is as relevant as ever. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Whistler was not interested in telling a story or in idealising the subjects in his paintings. He considered subject matter less important than colour and composition, and focused on creating a mood in his work. The original title now needs to be reclaimed: it is not Whistler’s mother that is important, it is the arrangement in grey and black.

The Marx Botherers: 125 years on

On the 125th anniversary of Karl Marx’s death, China’s Communist Government has announced that work on the first direct translation from the German of the 60 volumes of the Chinese-language edition of 'The Complete Works of Marx and Engels' won't be completed in the foreseeable future because of staff shortages. The work has never before been translated from German directly into Chinese and it has taken 18 years to produce the first 20 volumes. The latest deal is lack of new qualified translators who take up to ten years to train. The previous translation is based on a Russian version from the 1950s.

The father of communism, Karl Marx died on 14 March 1883 of pleurisy and bronchitis. However his writings on politics, economics and philosophy remain hugely influential today. Marx was born on 5 May 1818 at Trier in the Rhineland which was then part of Prussia. His father Heinrich was a lawyer who, although was from a Jewish family, registered as a Protestant when laws were passed preventing Jews from holding public positions. Europe was undergoing massive change during Karl’s early life. The Industrial Revolution was leading to the growth of the factory system and the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars led to the abolition of feudalism throughout much of Europe.

Marx followed in his father’s footsteps and studied law at the University of Bonn before moving on to history and philosophy. In 1836 he moved to the University of Berlin where he became interested in the teachings of Hegel. He wrote a thesis on Greek philosophers which was accepted at the University of Jena in 1841. In 1843 he married Johanna “Jenny” von Westphalen, the beautiful daughter of Baron von Westphalen, a cultured and politically progressive Prussian. That same year Marx began working for the radical newspaper Rheinische Zeitung. His hard-hitting articles on the plight of peasants in France’s Moselle region made waves and the paper was eventually censored and Marx was forced to resign.

Marx moved to Paris to escape Prussian political repression. There he encountered a vibrant working class and socialist movement. He briefly worked on a journal called German-French Annals where Marx first began to direct his appeals to the workers rather than the intellectuals. It was here he also met Friedrich Engels who was to become a lifelong friend. Engels was a business agent based in England working for his father. It was his article on economics for the Annals that impressed Marx.

While in Paris, Marx also became influenced by Russian anarchists including Mikhail Bakunin. Their ideas of a government-less society and absolute freedom became important to him as he struggled to work out his own philosophy. In 1848, he and Engels published their own theory of reform in a 12,000 word booklet called Manifesto of the Communist Party, popularly shortened to The Communist Manifesto. The book described the unfair state of society and how revolution could change it into an ideal communist state. It described how the capitalist system had come about and how it exploited the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The most famous rallying cry of the book read: The proletarians have nothing to lose except their chains…working men of all countries unite!”

Marx’s revolutionary ideas caused him to be expelled from France in 1845, from Belgium in 1848 and Prussia a year later. He moved to London where he settled for the rest of his life. His wife Jenny gave birth to seven children but only three survived. The baron’s daughter was not used to the crushing poverty she now found herself in. They relied heavily on Engel’s largesse while Marx learned English. His main source of income were the articles he wrote for newspapers such as the New York Herald Tribune.

In London, Marx’s main contacts were with other Europeans, particularly German and French radicals and refugees, with many of whom he had intermittent squabbles and disagreements. Marx spent the last 25 years of his life writing Das Kapital. This was to be a broad-ranging scientific study of capitalism, politics and economics running into several volumes. He spend much of his time researching at the British Museum library where he became a well known figure. Marx made extensive use of the library’s collection of factory inspectors’ and public health officers’ reports. Marx also spoke often at working men’s clubs and political groups.

Marx’s final years were dogged with illness especially bronchitis. Marx was a heavy smoker and also drank alcohol heavily. He made his illnesses worse by overwork. As well as working and speech-making, he was also heavily involved with the International Working Men’s Association which was better known simply as the International. Marx was a founder member of the international in 1864, wrote its inaugural address and drew up its statutes.

His last years were also dominated by personal tragedy. Jenny died in 1881 and his favourite eldest daughter, also Jenny, died a year later of cancer of the bladder. Marx never recovered from this double blow. He died in March 1883 with his great work incomplete. He was buried at London’s Highgate cemetery. After he died, Engels spent another 11 years working on Marx’s papers and completing the final volumes of Das Kapital.

Marx’s ideas were initially slow to spread. Although Marx himself expected the revolution to occur in the industrialised countries of Britain and Germany, it was Russia where his ideas were first put into practice. Marxism came to Tsarist Russia through the work of Georgi Plekhanov, son of a European based landowner. Plekhanov was the first Russian to write about Marxism as it applied to his own country. His ideas were taken on by students who spread the word through towns and factories.

One of the early converts was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov who was later to become known as Lenin. Lenin was sent to Siberia for three years for preaching Marxism to factory workers. He was a charismatic leader whose time came with Russia’s disastrous entry into World War I. His Bolsheviks gained power in October 1917 and inaugurated the dictatorship of the proletariat. But after many years of civil war, the Russian Communist state that emerged bore little resemblance to that envisioned by Marx and Engels. Russia was not developed economically enough for true communism to exist. Stalin became dictator on Lenin’s death and the state that Marx prophesised would ‘wither away’ instead became all powerful.

Although the capitalist system that Marx described no longer exists, Marxism remains relevant in the 21st century. His economic predictions that large corporations would dominate world markets and industry would become reliant on technology have both proven to be correct. At the end of the Cold War, critics suggested that Das Kapital was obsolete but by 1998 market panics in Asia caused the Financial Times to question if we had moved "from the triumph of global capitalism to its crisis in barely a decade. Marx’s philosophy is also pertinent. His ideas of the alienation of labour and its debilitating consequences on human beings has more credence than ever today.