Between 1839 and 1843, the Rebecca rioters of west Wales rode out at night to tear down toll gates and make their protest against the high tolls charged on the roads by the businessmen and investors who ran the Turnpike Trusts. The rioters blacked their faces and wore women’s dresses, and they were armed with guns and other weapons. Their visits were sometimes announced in advance by threatening letters signed by “Becca”. Some rioters were arrested and transported, and the unrest affected many lives. The history makes for a powerful setting for None So Blind . As Alis Hawkins explains in a historical note at the end of the novel, she has taken the story of the Rebeccas a little further by imagining that they have branched out into being a sort of moral vigilante group. It’s an idea that works really well, and even has an interesting feminist twist as at least one man gets visited for taking advantage of his female servants.  The public turmoil is matched by barrister Harry Prob...

My selected books for June took me from the beauty and culture of the Morris home at Kelmscott House, London in May Morris: Arts and Crafts Designer , Anna Mason et al, to the prison walls and harsh outback of Botany Bay in No Ordinary Convict: A Welshman Called Rebecca by Janine Marshall Wood, a book I read in draft before publication.  May Morris: Arts and Crafts Designer , Anna Mason, Jan Marsh, Jenny Lister, Rowan Bain and Hanne Faurby with Alice McEwan and Catherine White (Thames & Hudson, 2019) In 2017 the William Morris Gallery in London staged a major exhibition about the life and work of May Morris (1862–1938), artist, feminist and socialist. It was widely hailed as a long-overdue reassessment of the life and work of a key figure in the Arts and Crafts movement. May Morris: Arts and Crafts Designer was published to complement the exhibition, and described itself as “the first publication to present the full range of May Morris’s work”.    The only que...