Barbara Taylor writes:

John Barrell is a superb interpreter of 18th-century culture, a master of interdisciplinary analysis who segues easily between close readings of legal arguments about criminal speech, statistical calculations of the impact on food supply of flour being consumed in hair-powder production, and detailed criticism (with illustrations) of the country cottage aesthetic between 1770 and 1800. In Imagining the King’s Death (2000), Barrell explored with great precision the interplay between law, politics and language during Pitt’s ‘Reign of Terror’. The Spirit of Despotism revisits this culture of repression and tracks its incursions into the private sphere. The title is taken from a 1795 jeremiad by the Tonbridge headmaster Vicesimus Knox, which charged Pitt and his cronies with infusing British society with a tyrannical spirit. The government had declared war on its people, Knox claimed, and the front lines were everywhere: in newspapers, pulpits, taverns, the ‘sequestered walks of private life’.

Oxford | hardback 278pp |ISBN: 9780199281206