DR LIVINGSTONE, I PRESUME? Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers and Empire by Clare Pettitt

Profile £15.99 pp244

Pettitt uses Stanley’s much-parodied greeting to Livingstone as the focus for her outstanding analysis of celebrity, cultural memory and the manipulation of public mood. Stanley’s expedition, funded by a populist American newspaper, was reported simultaneously around the world by the miracle of telegraph. It came as Britons and Americans struggled to bury differences after the American civil war, and the saga inflamed the public imagination just as Disraeli’s Tories were ramping up the rhetoric of empire. Livingstone became a secular saint, whose funeral in 1874 saw a vast outpouring of grief. Stanley has had his reputation tarnished by early participation in the Belgian king Leopold II’s vile Congo adventure, but Pettitt explains how heavily he influenced our perceptions of Africa. A terrific book, which deals with a huge range of themes without losing nuance or historical sensitivity.

HOLLYWOOD ON TRIAL How McCarthyism Almost Killed the American Film Industry by Michael Freedland with Barbra Paskin

Robson £16.99 pp304

The House UnAmerican Activities Committee was a glaringly awful, unconstitutional collection of goons who whipped the movie world into a postwar frenzy of fear that saw Hollywood blacklist many of its best and brightest. The committee’s tragicomic tale is both horrifying and pertinent, a demonstration of how fragile our democracy can be, and how easily we can be cowed by illiberal demagoguery. Freedland tells the story, in the main, as a collective biography of the blacklistees. They provide him with moving instances, but this choppy, florid book feels hurried and confused. To understand the victims’ experience properly, we need to know more about the atmosphere of America as a whole, how the red scare operated in other arenas, and get a clearer idea of how his protagonists looked to those who hated them.

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