abandoned his teachings. Christ's insistence on man's freedom led to moral and social chaos, the Inquisitor argues. Man is weak; freedom makes him unhappy; he not only needs but actively wants to be ruled by force, and the church has made a pact with the devil to do just that. Dostoevsky's depiction of the totalitarian state in which the oppressed people effectively collude proved chillingly prophetic.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

A few years ago Julian Roach named a top list of books on Percy Bysshe Shelley for the Guardian.

One title on the list:

The Making of The English Working Class, by EP Thompson

It was the worst of times. In Castlereagh's England, to be poor - and almost everybody was - was to understand one great dismal economic truth: you could workyourself to death and earn enough to be merely hungry, or be thrown out of work and starve directly instead. To protest was treason, earning the lash, the Yeoman's sabre, transportation or the gallows.

Shelley's response was not only an angry call for radical change but also a profound insight into the economic and political machinery of injustice. As Shelley wrote, "a genius does not invent, he perceives." Thompson's eye-line and Shelley's are the same, and this great dissection of England's diseased body politic during, almost exactly, the years of Shelley's life, is the soundest basis available for understanding what made Shelley think like Shelley.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Frank Delaney's novel Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show was recently published by Random House.

For the Wall Street Journal he named a five best