Author Who Outsold Dickens… Stephen Carver’s “Author Who Outsold Dickens” (2020): Biography of a Crime Novelist 23 Mar 202023 Mar 2020 By Stephen Basdeo When I was doing my MA dissertation on the cultural history of crime, my supervisor, Dr Heather Shore, advised me to read two now largely forgotten novels:…
19th Century… Review: “The 19th-Century Underworld: Crime, Controversy & Corruption” by Stephen Carver 10 May 2019 By Stephen Basdeo Everyone nowadays seems fascinated by the Victorian criminal underworld. From Ripper Street to Peaky Blinders, it seems people cannot get enough of murdered sex workers and brutal…
Anglo-Saxon… No Longer a “Dark Age”: Susan Oosthuizen’s “The Emergence of the English” (2019) 10 Apr 2019 By Stephen Basdeo Professor Susan Oosthuizen’s The Emergence of the English (2019) is a lively and engaging book which takes aim at many widely and long-held assumptions about the emergence…
19th Century… Mike Leigh’s “Peterloo” (2018) 18 Nov 2018 Reviewed by Stephen Basdeo As a fan of English radical history (did I mention I once wrote a book about Wat Tyler?), I was really looking forward to Mike Leigh’s…
Counterfactual History… “Lenin Lives!” (2017) by Philip Cunliffe 20 Jul 201820 Jul 2018 Philip Cunliffe, Lenin Lives! (Winchester: Zero Books, 2018) RRP £9.99 Reviewed by Stephen Basdeo In 1890, the artist, designer, and visionary socialist, William Morris, published his novel News from Nowhere.…
11th Century… Hang’d, Drawn, and Quartered! “Spectacular Justice” during the Medieval and Early Modern Period 31 Aug 20173 May 2018 Katherine Royer’s new book, The English Execution Narrative, 1200-1700 (2015) analyses the meanings behind the often gruesome executions carried out in the medieval and early modern period. Reviewed by Stephen…
