Robert Shiels

Robert Shiels commends a new biography of the comic genius who fell victim to the USA's post-war red scare. This attractively produced book, with many photographs, is a social, political and cultural history of a crucial period in the life of an influential 20th century figure, an original and indep

Professor Joseph Bristow’s impressive new study, which deserves close attention, shows that the civil libel suit and the criminal trials involving Oscar Wilde were understood to be within the legal procedures of the time, writes Robert Shiels. The significantly wider importance of his book may

This small book, with a big title, is commendable in several ways: it shows quite how many courts or tribunals and different types of case a member of the Bar, in the author’s generation at least, might have had to deal with. The nature and extent of the pressing political and legal issues tha

There is an aphorism to the effect that history is past politics, and politics is present history. In this study, journalist Phil Tinline considers some of the events, over the first century of mass democracy, when politics lurched from crisis to crisis. The aim is see how this history of political

The criminal trial of Marshal Philippe Pétain in Paris in 1945 was that of the highest ranking military officer accused of treason, in having betrayed his country by collaboration with the enemy. The contrast in personal fortunes was extreme: Pétain had, as supreme commander of French

A psychonaut, according to a dictionary, is someone who explores altered states of consciousness, especially through hallucinatory drugs. The term apparently originates from 1970 when one author described the psychedelic, drug-induced experiences with his friend. Mike Jay is a historian of

The many, and systematically horrible, events in the southern states of America over many years in the middle of the last century are described in Margaret Burnham’s new book By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners. The phrase ‘Jim Crow’ is an American shorthand for