Lucinda Lambton

Paradise lost

The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica, by Ian Thomson

issue 30 May 2009

‘Jamaican history’, wrote Karl Marx, ‘is characteristic of the beastliness of a true Englishman’. In The Dead Yard, Ian Thomson laments the consequences, with the grim conclusion that the British planters cast Jamaica aside like a sucked orange once they had exploited their estates. Having shaped Jamaica’s past for good or ill, Britain has not helped to shape its future for the good.

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