Conspiracy on Cato Street: A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London

"There is no better guide to metropolitan high and low life than Gatrell...His account of the gory melodrama of the executions is a tour de force, complete with the death-cell portraits and testimonies of the five condemned men...In a final flourish of detective work, Gatrell reveals that the French artist Théodore Géricault, passing through London with 'The Raft of the Medusa,' made unflinching sketches of what proved to be the last public executions of traitors in England...The decision to focus the book tightly on London, and on the few weeks before the conspiracy, pays off handsomely in one way, but it comes at a cost...What remains is nonetheless an enthralling classic of London history."

"This multinational and multi-ethnic plot has long been dismissed by the few historians who have deigned to notice it as a quixotic oddity dreamt up by deluded dreamers and marginalised psychopaths...It has taken more than two centuries but in Gatrell's wonderful book we have the first convincing full-length study of how and why this motley crew of British, Irish and Jamaican revolutionaries found themselves armed to the teeth in a dingy cowshed dreaming of a new world."

"Gatrell looks at how ordinary people made radical ideas their own."

"In February 1820, 25 impoverished craftsmen gathered in a stable on Cato Street in London, planning 'to massacre the whole British government as it sat down to dinner in a Grosvenor Square mansion'...Gatrell mines a treasure trove of primary sources to examine the plotters' motivations and contextualize the era's radical politics...Enriched by Gatrell's observation that 'the inequalities and deprivations that moved the conspirators, and the privileged interests and powers that contained them, still operate,' this is a fine-grained study of political extremism in action."