Toby Thomas
Prurient Puritan
Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of W T Stead
By W Sydney Robinson
Robson Press 281pp £20 order from our bookshop
When W T Stead drowned on the Titanic, Lord Northcliffe paid tribute to the ‘great revolution which he effected in journalism’. If Northcliffe – founder of the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror – established the financial model of the tabloid press, Stead forged its moral tone. His sensationalist reports were fired by religious indignation. They etched the fear of paedophilia deep into the public imagination. He hoped to replace parliamentary democracy with ‘Government by Journalism’ and his campaigns were instrumental in increasing the age of consent, in sending General Gordon to Khartoum, and in detonating the sex scandals that destroyed the careers of two Victorian political heavyweights, Sir Charles Dilke and Charles Stewart Parnell. The interview and roaring 24-point headlines were both journalistic innovations of his.
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
Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3