PositiveThe Times Literary SupplementThere 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.
