Selina O’Grady

Remember, Remember

Gunpowder Plots: A Celebration of 400 Years of Bonfire Night

By

Allen Lane 188pp £14.99 order from our bookshop

God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot

By

HarperCollins 445pp £20 order from our bookshop

Ever since Samson brought the temple crashing down around his and the Philistines’ heads, we have ricocheted between admiration and hatred of civilian killers of a civilian enemy. Are they the morally tortured terrorists of Camus’s Les Justes, fatally misguided, but reluctantly believing their violence is justified? Or are they the loathsome, amoral losers of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, who want to bomb their way out of their own powerlessness with no thought for their victims?

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Jane Ridley writes on Who’s In, Who’s Out: The Journals of Kenneth Rose, edited by D R Thorpe ,
    • 'Lucian Freud was never short of confidence. In the 1990s he painted a small head of an especially rich individual… ,
    • Robin Simon's review of Lucian Freud, edited by Martin Gayford and David Dawson ,
    • 'Lenin regularly communicated with his agents in Russia by postcard and Stalin sent girlfriends cards depicting ero… ,
    • RT : Could any book publishing people share with me their route into publishing roles for a sixth former I am working wi… ,
    • Donald Rayfield reviews Greetings From the Barricades: Revolutionary Postcards in Imperial Russia by Tobie Maythew ,
    • 'Citadel of the Saxons manages to turn the slim pickings of the surviving evidence into something like a consistent… ,
    Follow Us