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Lead book review

Has land ownership changed our lives for better or for worse?

It made Britain a world power, but unleashed the kind of greed that led to the wolves of Wall Street, according to the late great Andro Linklater in Owning the Earth

8 February 2014

9:00 AM

8 February 2014

9:00 AM

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership Andro Linklater

Bloomsbury, pp.483, £20, ISBN: 9781408815748

If the gentle reader has any concerns that a study of land ownership might tend to the dry, they will be dispelled in the very first pages of this book by the spectacular flamboyance of its opening. There is not an economist in sight. Instead, we have the piratical figure of the Sir Humphrey Gilbert — Elizabethan seadog, soldier and mathematician, ‘openly bisexual’, and with the arresting habit of ‘decapitating his enemies after battle [and] then lining the path to his tent with their severed heads’ — returning in 1583 from the first expedition to create an English colony in...

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John Adamson is a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and the author of The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I. Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £16.00, Tel: 08430 600033.

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