Sarah Burton

Marilyn was murdered

In The Mill on the Floss, having been given a ‘petrifying’ summary of Daniel Defoe’s History of the Devil by young Maggie, Mr Riley challenges Mr Tulliver with allowing his daughter access to such dangerous reading material. A perplexed Tulliver explains:

Why, it’s one o’ the books I bought at Partridge’s sale.They was all bound alike — it’s a good binding, you see — and I thought they’d be all good books. There’s Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying among ’em. I read in it often of a Sunday’ (Mr Tulliver felt somehow a familiarity with that great writer, because his name was Jeremy). ‘And there’s a lot more of ’em — sermons mostly, I think — but they’ve all got the same covers, and I thought they were all o’ one sample, as you may say. But it seems one mustn’t judge by th’ outside. This is a puzzlin’ world.

Conspiracy! bears out both the old admonition not to judge a book by its cover and Tulliver’s conclusion about the state of the world. Your average Spectator reader (in the improbable event that such a creature exists) would be unlikely to pick this book off a shelf on the grounds of the cover alone, which shouts its title with all the subtlety of a market trader flogging cut-price tat. Because the character of the contents entirely belie this inauspiciously crude invitation, I am obliged to infer that the cover is ironic, thereby allowing all intelligent people full permission to be seen reading it in public places.

And it’s a puzzling world indeed that Ian Shircore unpicks. In a series of short, incisive chapters he cuts through the dross and hogwash associated with a range of popular conspiracy theories and presents the cases for and against based purely on the facts (as far as they are verifiable through eye-witness accounts and official documentation) with forensic stringency.

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