Fara Dabhoiwala

Fara Dabhoiwala teaches at Princeton. He is the author of The Origins of Sex: The History of the First Sexual Revolution and What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea. He is writing a biography of Francis Williams, which expands on the discoveries he discussed in the LRB.

Letter

Dangerous Idea

22 May 2025

Rachel Hammersley is right that scholars have long known in general terms why John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon wrote their influential anonymous political column, Cato’s Letters, in the early 1720s (Letters, 5 June). But the ‘unexplored puzzle’ elucidated in one of the chapters of my book What Is Free Speech? is more specific: how did they manage to invent an entirely new way of thinking...

In​ the autumn of 1928, a previously unknown painting turns up on the London art market. It belongs to a Major Henry Howard of Surrey. He is 45 years old. His father has just died and left him a large estate, and he’s selling off much of it – houses, land, family heirlooms. There are death duties; he has five young daughters and a marriage that’s going to end soon. He needs...

Seagull Soup: HMS Wager

Fara Dabhoiwala, 9 May 2024

In​ 1739, on the outbreak of war with Spain, the British government sent two fleets to attack its enemy’s possessions in South America. A huge armada of nearly two hundred vessels and almost thirty thousand men sailed for the West Indies under the newly promoted Vice Admiral Edward Vernon, hero of the recent taking of Porto Bello in Panama, to capture other key Spanish possessions in...

Letter
Stephen Sedley relies on 19th-century sources to claim that Julian, the enslaved Indian teenager, would have been ‘forbidden by law to testify in his own defence’ during his Old Bailey trial in 1724 (Letters, 7 July). But at this earlier date different principles applied, and procedure was much more informal. Criminal trials were very brief, often lasting only a few minutes. The same jury would...

On Valentine’s Day​ 1661 Elizabeth Pepys and her husband, Sam, rose early and walked from their house behind the Tower of London down Seething Lane. They were to visit one of Sam’s superiors, William Batten, surveyor of the navy. The custom was that women should take the first man they saw as their Valentine, so long as he was no relation. The previous year, Elizabeth had...

It’s​ puzzling, unsettling even, to see ‘free speech’ rearing its head in public debate again, rousing passions which seemed long defunct. Wasn’t the doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton...

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