Richard Barber
Atishoo, Atishoo
The Scourging Angel: The Black Death in the British Isles
By Benedict Gummer
The Black Death is one of the best-known landmarks of medieval history, and has already been the subject of numerous histories in many languages. It is a dramatic and dreadful episode, the stuff of nightmares: an unknown and devastating disease arrives from the East and spreads relentlessly across western Europe, beginning in a Genoese trading post in the Crimea. Italy and France succumb to it, and by the time it reaches England, its full horror is already known and fearfully anticipated. The rudimentary medicine of the time is powerless against it, and it reaches every corner of the British Isles before it finally fades away.
Historians have in the past taken the obvious line of a narrative account, and limited themselves to the progress and immediate effects of the pestilence itself. John Hatcher recently hazarded a semi-fictional version, concentrating on the impact of the plague on one community. Benedict Gummer offers a very
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger