Jane Ridley
The Righteous Reformer
William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner
By William Hague
HarperPress 552pp £25 order from our bookshop
Once barely noticed, the history of the anti-slavery campaign has gathered such momentum that it has now become the central narrative of Our Island Story. The hero of this tale is William Wilberforce, and a new biography is overdue. Wilberforce’s struggle to ban slavery has been dramatised in the biopic Amazing Grace. Now, nicely timed for the bicentenary year, William Hague has written his life.
The story of William Wilberforce (1759–1833) is an extraordinary one. The heir to a Hull merchant’s fortune, he became an MP at the age of twenty-one, was best mates with the younger Pitt and a rich young man about town until the age of twenty-six, when he underwent a classic
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Joanna Kavenna reviews Maggie Nelson's ‘On Freedom’, ‘a very serious and beautiful book about why “freedom” has become such a vexed term, deployed so often in scenarios where it really means the opposite’.
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