Reading list
For Big Ben Lying Down with Political Books Marta Minujín invited a coalition of Manchester and Salford
based organisations to put together a list of 160 books critical to ‘Britain’s politics and democracy past,
present and future’. 20000 books cover the structure and for the climax of the artwork the books are all
removed and given away for free
The reading list tells an electrifying story about the social, political and cultural life of the British
people. It looks back at figures who fought injustice, honours neglected histories, and places contemporary
Britain at the heart of the fight on global issues such as poverty and racial injustice.
It begins with Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, written in 1776, and ends with Marcus Rashford’s You Are a
Champion, published this year. Almost 250 years separate them, but Paine could be thinking about Rashford
when he writes: ‘The defects of every government and constitution must… be as open to discussion as the
defects of a law, and it is a duty which every man owes to society to point them out.’