Selina O’Grady

Remember, Remember

Gunpowder Plots: A Celebration of 400 Years of Bonfire Night

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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

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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?

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