On the two hundredth anniversary of the assassination of Spencer Perceval - the only British Prime Minister ever to have suffered that fate - this is the riveting untold story of the murder, the murderer and the repercussions of his act
Andro Linklater is the author of Measuring America: How An Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy, The Fabric of America: How Our Borders and Boundaries Shaped the Country and Forged Our National Identity, and An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson. He lives in England.
Andro Linklater's Why Spencer Perceval Had to Die is a beautifully
written portrait of an overlooked prime minister and a fascinating
account of his assassination during the Napoleonic Wars
*Antony Beevor*
Enjoyable if ultimately eccentric survey ... He is entertaining on
the temper of the times
*Andrew Holgate, The Sunday Times Ireland*
Written with novelistic pace and the literary devices of a
potboiler, the book is really two in one. The first, an overview of
Perceval's neglected career, is sure-footed and worthy. The second,
a breathlessly conspiratorial account of his death, is compulsively
readable and wildly implausible
*Wall Street Journal*
Deftly sniffing out political machinations and murderous
conspiracies, Linklater has written a richly atmospheric,
engrossing and authoritative account of an assassination that,
Linklater notes, shook the world 200 years ago as forcefully as
JFK's assassination did in our time
*Publishers Weekly*
Andro Linklater makes good use of the excellent copy that this
story affords
*Literary Review*
The facts revealed by letters, diaries and court records are
fascinating enough. Linklater's book has more value than a
historical whodunit. It helps us to understand the turbulent times
and series of events that the author believes, inevitably, led to
Perceval's assassination. It gives us a genuine understanding of
the two key figures: the prime minister and his murderer
*Sunday Express*
Wonderful and fascinating ... It deserves to be a classic, plunged
into the American reader's consciousness as firmly as the iron
spikes or the witness trees at the edges of the maps it so
splendidly describes
*Simon Winchester, Boston Globe on Measuring
America*
Andro Linklater has the talent not just to let us know how things
work, but to make us want to know. He encloses his specifics inside
generalities inside universals, as if they were nested Russian
dolls ... a magical mystery tour that leaves the reader exhilarated
by unexpected connections ... Throughout the book, Mr Linklater has
allowed his humans wonderfully to subvert his measurings
*New York Times*
In Measuring America, Linklater traces with unusual elegance and a
keen wit the epic story of measuring our nation, charting the
process by which, with each length of the surveyor's chain, new
states were literally bought into being ... remarkable
*Los Angeles Times*
Linklater very skilfully reconstructs the careers of both
Bellingham and Perceval towards their fatal convergence. In doing
so, he uncovers a host of ambiguities, vested interests, national
and international intrigues and unexplained facts ... Linklater
reconstructs this forgotten moment of history with both wit and
care. It is a gloriously murky, brilliantly crepuscular book
*Stuart Kelly Scotland on Sunday*
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