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Verdicts
“One of the pleasures of this book lies in the revelation of an almost forgotten world of landladies, spies, dockyard workers, tavern owners and the rest of the then mundane world. It is a panorama of hidden 18th-century life, as fresh and as vivid as if it occurred yesterday,” Peter Ackroyd, London Times
More puffery for John the Painter . . .
“Jessica Warner is not the first to write about the gin craze, but her book is easily the best on the subject . . . Warner’s book is acutely alive to the difficulty of reading the past through the concerns of the present. Thus while she feels impelled to make parallels between the public reaction to the gin craze and our own current, impotent flap about drug use, she anchors her arguments in precise, scholarly data and is always ready to point to the places where the analogies do not stand up. Added to this, she writes like an angel, which makes her as cheerily compelling as a nice G&T at the end of a long, hard day,” Kathryn Hughes, Daily Telegraph