Monographs: The Sounds of Silence: The Ransom

‘As the historical-scholarship industry expands,’ Benjamin Moser wrote earlier this year, ‘certain subjects, and not only the most interesting ones, have become so weighed down with bibliography that the historian wishing to create a coherent picture of a famous epoch, episode, or personage will soon be as overwhelmed as a man trying to hack his way through the Amazon with a pair of nail scissors.’