Slavery
The burden of freedom: Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan, reviewed
It’s 1830, and among the sugar cane of Faith Plantation in Barbados, suicide seems like the only way out. Decapitations…
Brazil: a country fizzing with excitement
As the great Bossa Nova musician Tom Jobim liked to say, Brazil is not for beginners. This tends to be…
A Shout in the Ruins, by Kevin Powers, reviewed
We’re in Virginia, in the 1850s. A girl called Emily is tormenting her dog, Champion, and her father’s teenage slave,…
Brotherly love
Jane Harris’s novels often focus on the disenfranchised: a maid in The Observations, a woman reduced by spinsterhood in the…
Raising Cain
It is a pretty safe bet that for every 1,000 people who know of William Wilberforce, no more than the…
Must Colston fall?
Edward Colston, mega-rich philanthropist around the year 1700, is the nearest thing Bristol has to a patron saint. The largest…
Stitches in time
When Martha Ann Ricks was 76 she travelled from her home in Liberia to London to meet Queen Victoria. The…
Annie Proulx is lost in the woods
You can’t see the wood for the trees in Annie Proulx’s epic novel of logging and deforestation in North America, says Philip Hensher
The 1850s: a dizzying decade of boom and bust
We can all identify decades in which the world moved forward. Wars are not entirely negative experiences: the social and…
The sophisticates are wrong about Cleveland, Ohio
To Cleveland, Ohio, where middle America’s middle class begins its great Midwest sprawl. I’ve always wanted to visit Cleveland because…
Escape Antigua’s tourists (but be ready to confront some grim secrets)
‘Tourism, tourism and tourism,’ said my Antiguan cab driver, when I asked what the country’s main industries were. Still, it’s…
The strange history of Willoughbyland, modern-day Suriname
John Gimlette on the strange and superbly told story of Willoughbyland, England’s ‘lost’ colony
From ambrosia to zabaglione — now with added slavery
This Oxford Companion ranges from the sweet to the decidedly salty, while being the most politically correct reference book you will ever consult, says Paul Levy
The turbulent reign of King Cotton: the dark history of one of the world’s most important commodities
If not for cotton, we would still be wearing wool. To equal current cotton production, we would need seven billion…
Only tourists think of the Caribbean as a ‘paradise’
A couple of years ago in Jamaica, I met Errol Flynn’s former wife, the screen actress Patrice Wymore. Reportedly a…
The starchy, conservative lawyer who freed every slave in England
Slavery was ended in England not through blood and glory, but by the common law
How Plato and Aristotle would have tackled unemployment
Labour is up in arms because many of the new jobs currently being created are among the self-employed. This seems…
Where to open your brothel: an international comparison
The best places to open a brothel The Commons all-party group on prostitution has called for a Scandinavian-style law where…
What 12 Years a Slave gets wrong – and The Book Thief gets right
Damn, damn, damn! It has to be me, and all these years I’ve been thinking it was Hollywood. By the…
Christianity is the foundation of our freedoms
If there is one underlying source from which all our other societal problems stem, it is surely this: we no…
Ferdinand Mount's diary: Supermac was guilty!
You have to hand it to Supermac. Fifty years after the event, he is still running rings round them. The…
Deborah Ross: 12 Years a Slave harrowed me to within an inch of my life
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave goes directly to the heart of American slavery without any shilly-shallying — unlike The…
The Butler, about a black domestic in the White House, is too painfully obvious
The Butler tells the story of an African–American butler at the White House who served eight American presidents over three…
Carlos Acosta, the great dancer, should be a full-time novelist
Carlos Acosta, the greatest dancer of his generation, grew up in Havana as the youngest of 11 black children. Money…
