James and John: A True Story of Prejudice and Murder

CHRIS BRYANT

(BLOOMSBURY, 336 PP, £25)

TABLET BOOKSHOP PRICE £22.50 • TEL 020 7799 4064

On 29 August 1835, two adult men had consensual sex in a private room, for which they were murdered. We could call it a hate crime, had James Pratt and John Smith not died at the hands of the English criminal justice system itself: hanged, as the recorder of London, Charles Ewan Law MP, prescribed, “by the neck till the body be dead, dead, dead”.