Thomas Keymer

Gustave Lanson​ , doyen of Enlightenment scholarship a century ago, described Voltaire’s early masterpiece Lettres philosophiques as ‘la première bombe lancée contre l’ancien régime’. It’s true that Voltaire would become a hero of the revolution (his ashes were ceremoniously moved to the Panthéon in 1791), and there were plenty of things...

Cut out​ the right bits (that scene where Gulliver extinguishes a palace fire in Lilliput by urinating on the roof) and Gulliver’s Travels is the perfect children’s book, a supremely accessible work of imagination. But what does it actually mean? Swift thought (or affected to think) its subtextual implications so dangerous that he dealt only pseudonymously with his publisher,...

To​ modern eyes, The Memorial of the Church of England, Humbly Offer’d to the Consideration of All True Lovers of Our Church and Constitution might look like a benign, beard-and-sandals kind of title. It wasn’t. In 1705, a memorial was a petition and there was nothing humble about this one. In 56 snarling pages, it denounced dissenters from the established Church, excoriated...

John Keats​ went walking in the Lake District in June 1818. It was the first decent summer since the eruption of an Indonesian volcano three years before had tipped postwar Europe into a crisis of failed harvests, mass hunger and widespread social unrest. In Britain, Lord Liverpool’s government had suspended Habeas Corpus; Luddite organisers, revolutionary Spenceans and radical...

The Turk’s Head​ isn’t the kind of name you’d choose for a pub these days, though there’s still one in Wapping, and another in Twickenham. The famous Turk’s Head was in Gerrard Street in Soho, a precinct first laid out under Charles II, popular with authors and artists from the start (Dryden moved to Gerrard Street in 1687 while still poet laureate), and by...