Juniper Hall Book

The most biased political biography since Anton Pellugocci’s Why Mussolini is never Wrong and Also an underrated Short Order Chef (1931) (don’t google it, I made it up). Here we have, I’m reliably informed in this books preface, the only biography of Marat in English outside of Gottschalk fifty years earlier. If a biography of Marat can be said to be well overdue, this isn’t it. Conner tries to revaluate his subject in a more positive light than what is found outside of Marxist histories. He’s far too rambunctious in his task, not conceding a single inch at any stage, often committing cavalier fallacies and even ignoring historical evidence in the process. The result of this entirely chinkless armour is not so much impenetrability as unbelievability. It just doesn’t make for good history. There’s information to be gleamed here but proceed with caution, this isn’t a case of ‘one side of the story’, it’s a case of historical fantasy. Still, I don’t blame people for their rigid political bias, but I do ask that they justify them. Clearly written however, and the Tom Clancy style political thriller style makes for some genuine page quickened page turning. In his (admittedly also heavily biased) biography Gottschalk talks about ‘even the most blinkered Marat apologist’ turns out he wasn’t speaking hypothetically.