Author:David Lawday
Danton: Gentle Giant of Terror
In this new biography, David Lawday, author of the acclaimed Napoleon's Master, a life of Talleyrand, turns his focus to the life of Georges-Jacques Danton, tragic hero incarnate.
A beefy six-foot bull of a man, with a rude farmyard face to match, Danton was destined to bring a violent end to an absolute monarchy that had ruled for a thousand years. But it was not his alarming physique that placed him at the head of the Revolution. His weapon of revolt was his voice - a perpetual roll of thunder that spurred men to action without his quite knowing where he intended to drive them. To hear Danton was to hear the heartbeat of revolution. Together with the puritanical Robespierre - his rival to death and in most every way his opposite - Danton brought about something rare in history: a change in the human social order. The reckless ride from monarchy to republic was a mass social revolution that upended the most populous country in Europe - an upheaval so uniquely radical in spirit that formed the root - if not quite of that liberty and equality its makers dreamed of - at least of the liberal, democratic society in which a good part of the world is fairly content to live today. What manner of man makes such stupendous things happen?
With prose that is immediate and engaging, Lawday examines the personalities and the associations that inspired and fuelled the Revolution. The power of Danton's oratory, and his charismatic appeal, led him to the centre of power at the height of a period of turbulent change. But he was to become a victim of Revolution himself, facing the guillotine - defiant to the end - at the age of thirty-four.
Lively and well-researched: an excellent read
—— Peter Heather, author of The Fall of the Roman EmpireThis is a history of Rome that combines vivid drama and a gripping storyline with a keen alertness to bigger historical questions
—— Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge UniversityBrings the distant past to fully fleshed life
—— Good Book GuideHighly recommended
—— Birmingham Evening MailRome is revealed as it really was - gritty, magnificent and sometimes pretty sordid. Splendid stuff
—— Manchester Evening NewsAn entertaining but rigorous antidote to the fast-and-loose-with-the-truth approach.
—— Radio TimesGives the readers a lucid account of the Empire's expansion
—— Contemporary ReviewParker has the tone of a dream Latin teacher, disciplined and wry, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the classical world
—— Vera Rule , GuardianA Royal Affair is an entertaining tale ...Tillyard's account of the brothers is heroic...[she] tells this astonishing tale with bravura
—— John de Falbe , Daily TelegraphShe has returned to what she knows-and does-best, teasing out the bonds of love, hate and pretend indifference that bind siblings, no matter what their historical pedigree, into a cat's cradle of consequence
—— EconomistThe story is brilliantly told. In its descriptive flourishes it is sometimes fearlessly novelistic, yet it travels long distances for scholarly scruples
—— John Mullan , Times Literary Supplement