Thomas Paine called himself a citizen of the world and as if to sustain this claim was an active revolutionary in Britain, France and America. If any one of his contemporaries deserves the title more it is William Duane.
BOOK REVIEW: Transoceanic Radical: William Duane Read Post »
This challenging book is printed in typescript of adequate size for those readers whose eyesight might be declining. Part one analyses the meaning of “democracy”, but the advice in print at the head of its ‘Table of Contents’ that ‘The US, England and France are not democracies’ – gives a due.
BOOK REVIEW: “Democracy? Not yet, perhaps never” Read Post »
Although this is not a book about Thomas Paine, it does bring out the extent of his influence amongst members of the freethought and Secularist movement in England during the 19th century, in particular the use by them of the arguments found in his Age of Reason.
BOOK REVIEW: Crisis Of Doubt, Honest Faith In Nineteenth-Century England Read Post »
One cannot do justice to this fascinating and I would say controversial work. Ms. Vickers in the space available, she rejects the charge that Paine’s work lacks originality and she is scathing about some of the comments made by several scholars critical of Paine.
BOOK REVIEW: “My Pen And My Soul Have Ever Gone Together” Read Post »
That century with its agricultural and industrial revolutions, the Wesley and English Methodism, the sciences, the challenge of slavery, the French and American revolutions, Thomas Paine and other enlightened thinkers, but then the loss of the colonies – was not an easy stage on which a woman might make her case.
BOOK REVIEW: Gender, Religion And Radicalism In The Long Eighteenth Century Read Post »
Robert Aspland wrote a substantial memoir in the Monthly Repository that Joyce “displayed his earnestness chiefly when exposing the misrepresentations of sophists and the calumnies of bigots. He was tolerant of all but baseness and hypocrisy.”
BOOK REVIEW: Jeremiah Joyce, Radical, Dissenter and Writer Read Post »
Could this be the same Harry Harmer who was a South London contact for Republic in the 1980s? Why having written on Martin Luther King, the Labour party and slavery he chooses to write a biography of Paine when there are already enough of them to fill a small library?
BOOK REVIEW: Tom Paine, The Life of a Revolutionary. Harry Harmer Read Post »
The author starts his search in New York, initially tracking down the house that Thomas Paine died in and visiting various other sites associated with his last days, before his burial at his farm in New Rochelle.
BOOK REVIEW: The Trouble With Tom Read Post »
In a sense this book, the screenplay written by Trevor Griffith’s for the proposed film in his life of Paine, well almost, as it does not take boyhood, saddens me, since its publication infers, to me at least, that the film may never be made.
BOOK REVIEW: These Are The Times, A Life Of Thomas Paine Read Post »
Although it may seem an exaggeration I nevertheless feel that books devoted to the history of secularism are sadly as rare as hens teeth, so it was something of a surprise when I read a mention in an American publication about the forthcoming publication of the work under review.
BOOK REVIEW: Freethinkers, A History Of American Secularism Read Post »
Because it advocated the franchise, Anarchists were critical of the Suffragette movement. However, it should be noted that Sylvia Pankhurst’s group which became the Workers’ Socialist Federation would share many of the Anarchists’ criticisms of the outcome of the 1917 Russian Revolution.
BOOK REVIEW: Anarchist Ideas And Counter-Cultures In Britain, 1880-1914 Read Post »
This book was both stimulating and a pleasure to read for the author writes extremely well. Almost Painite in style, I am tempted to say. His essays are fully referenced with his notes being placed below the pages to which they apply rather than at the end of each essay.
BOOK REVIEW: The Transatlantic Republican, Thomas Paine And The Age Of Revolutions Read Post »
