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.

Jun 2011

Higher Gossip

History plus Sex

Not a Great Writer but a Bit of a Word Painter

Not a Great Writer

Holy Fool?

Citizen Vain

Rich Pickings

A Life Well Read

A Scapegoat’s Tale

Speaking In Tongues

Secrets and Lyres

Mann’s Inhumanity to Mann

No Alcibiades!

The New Bullshit

An Affair To Remember

Hath Not A Jew Eyes…

‘The One Wanted Most’

Revenge of the Second-Rate

Escape to Liberty

Principle Actors

The True History of the Heydrich Plan

Culture Vultures

In the Caudillo’s Shadow

Scapegoats

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