Frederic Raphael
Ship of Fools
Treason of the Heart: From Thomas Paine to Kim Philby
By David Pryce-Jones
Encounter Books 258pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
The Ship of Fools is never short of passengers or crew. In David Pryce-Jones’s brisk new polemic, he sketches a pageant of British men and women who regularly had a good word for dictators, left and right: from Tom Paine to Kim Philby; Joseph Priestley (the great eighteenth-century scientist who applauded the renovating qualities of the guillotine) to ‘jolly’ J B Priestley (who in 1946 reported that there were no secret police in Russia, ‘unless they were disguised as sparrows’); and from Hazlitt (three cheers for Boney!) to Bernard Shaw.
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
Read more for less
Use code 'SPRING3FOR5'
https://mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/spring3for5/
The Disney film 'created the "standard version" that no fairy tale should ever have, for these are stories that are elastic, mischievous ... becoming slightly different with each telling'.
@LucyLethbridge on the story of Snow White.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/beauty-beastliness
His 'star – in the way writers’ reputations unfathomably come and go – shines less brightly than it once did, unfairly I think.'
@saradwheeler recalls visiting the home of the Bronxite E L Doctorow.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/doctorows-orders