The Redress of Poetry

Thomas Albert Howard (Author)

Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History

9,A sweeping history of the violence perpetrated by governments committed to extreme forms of secularism in the twentieth century A popular truism derived from the Enlightenment holds that violence is somehow inherent to religion, to which political secularism offers a liberating solution. But this assumption ignores a glaring modern reality: that putatively progressive regimes committed to secularism have possessed just as much and often a vastly greater capacity for violence as those tied to a religious identity. In Broken Altars, Thomas Albert Howard presents a powerful account of the misery, deaths, and destruction visited on religious communities by secularist regimes in the twentieth century. Presenting three principal forms of modern secularism that have arisen since the Enlightenment--passive secularism, combative secularism, and eliminationist secularism--Howard argues that the latter two have been especially violence-prone. Westerners do not fully grasp this, however, because they often mistake the first form, passive secularism, for secularism as a whole. But a disconcertingly more complicated picture emerges with the adoption of a broader global vision. Admitting ...

Tony Spawforth (Author)

What the Greeks Did for Us

An enjoyable, accessible exploration of the legacy of ancient Greece today, across our daily live

Sara Lodge (Author)

The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective

6,A revelatory history of the women who brought Victorian criminals to account--and how they became a cultural sensationShortlisted for The Wolfson History Prize 2025 From Wilkie Collins to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the traditional image of the Victorian detective is male. Few people realise that women detectives successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves. Sara Lodge recovers these forgotten women's lives. She also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction, enthralling a public who relished the spectacle of a cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroine who got the better of love rats, burglars, and murderers alike. How did the morally ambiguous work of real women detectives, sometimes paid to betray their fellow women, compare with the exploits of their fictional counterparts, who always save the day? Lodge's book takes us into the murky underworld of Victorian society on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the female detective as both an unacknowledged labourer and a feminist icon. ...