Let custards quake
Colin Burrow: Satire without the Jokes, 24 July 2025
State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature
by Dan Sperrin.
Princeton, 800 pp., £38, July,978 0 691 19558 2 Show More
by Dan Sperrin.
Princeton, 800 pp., £38, July,
“... with a universal misanthropy, then Swift would sit fuming in the middle of that history. Dan Sperrin focuses on political satire, and his book has a scale and chronological range that borders on the exhausting. It begins in Rome, ventures boldly into Anglo-Saxon England, progresses through satirists such as Walter Map (under Henry II) and ... ”
