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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An echo from the past, 1 Nov 2004
Colonel Despard was a moral, upright man, whom the Government of the day mistreated and then crushed, in a particularly horrible way, because of political expediency. There is an echo from the past that our times might heed there. Mike Jay's telling of the story is better on Despard's earlier years than his later ones, probably because there is more information available for the early years. When Despard slipped out of public view -- either for his own purposes or through circumstance -- then the documentary evidence of his life fell away too. Consequently Jay has to rely on speculation and some judicious background painting to do his narrative job for him in the second half of the book. That having been said it is a gripping story, well told and with local colour skilfully added in. But slightly thinner than is necessary to give a really satisfying read.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A compelling read, 20 Feb 2005
I choose this because of my interest in my Jamaican ancestry and fully expected to just read a few pages or chapters of relevance, but I found this a compelling read. A useful book for those studying 18th century British politics and society; British colonialism, or those interested in Jamaican history.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A man before his time, 23 Dec 2009
The story, in very truncated form is as follows: a brave soldier is fast-tracked to promotion from lieutenant to colonel because of outstanding services and because in the tropics people fell like flies in those days, is posted as a `governor' of a remote Caribbean settlement of only 100 people or so and through no fault of his own he applies the law to the letter when it is politically inconvenient to do so (because it interferes with the trade of mahogany), so he is removed and kept without a command on half pay and not paid the expenses that he is due, so he is embittered and falls in with the republican movement and is implicated in a plot to kill the king, only the evidence is pretty non-existent.
Now I can breathe.
That's the long and the short of the story. Don't get me wrong, this is an interesting story set in the times of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the nascent British empire, but there is so little documentary evidence for anything that it's hard to see how most of what is written is little better than guesswork. This lack of evidence is by the author's own admission! The case against Despard is non-existent too. We have no idea how much he was involved in the plot, if there was any plot at all, and we have no idea really what his motives in anything were. He, a gentleman, a colonel, no less, was found in a pub in working-class area of London with "rough" commoners, two with seditious oaths on their person. So he must have been up to something! So it goes.
Having scoffed at the lack of any evidence, which to my way of looking at things a history book must be based on, this book is written very well and is quite interesting as a social history, though sometimes the background history does seem to take over the main story. The background is necessary, though, which shows that Despard was a man before his time. A democrat who wasn't racist. He was also taken from the world before his time, though he WASN'T hanged, drawn and quartered, which the blurb proclaims, he was SENTENCED TO BE hanged, drawn and quartered. In fact the sentence was commuted to omit the quartering and the disembowelling.
It's not as good as The Air Loom Gang either, which I thought was excellent. It is more focused and well-documented than this offering. I also like the cover and the illustrations.
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