Vic Gatrell is a professorial Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, who has taught for most of his career in the Cambridge Faculty of History. His previous books include The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People (1997) which was awarded the Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society; City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (2009) which was awarded the Wolfson Prize for History and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize; and The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London's Golden Age (2013) which was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize.
'In his gripping new book, Vic Gatrell rescues the Cato Street conspirators from the enormous condescension of posterity , and reconstructs in enthralling detail the world of low taverns, debtors' prisons and radical extremism from which they came. This is a brilliantly written masterpiece that triumphantly succeeds in restoring humanity and dignity to its subjects. It should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in the history of conspiracies, and in British history more generally.' Richard J. Evans, author of The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 'Erudite, engaging and brilliantly wide-ranging, Vic Gatrell's Conspiracy on Cato Street is peppered with revealing detail and is compulsively readable. This is historical scholarship at its very finest.' Emma Griffin, author of Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy 'Vic Gatrell has brilliantly resurrected from obscurity the world of the conspirators who plotted to murder the British cabinet in February 1820. With unexampled forensic skill and psychological empathy he has provided a masterly exploration of proletarian London during the Regency.' Jerry White, author of London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God