The aim of this talk is to take a fresh look at the image of Britain’s first Public Enemy Number One: Thomas Paine. From the 1790s onwards, Paine’s political and religious writings symbolized everything that the British establishment feared about radical ideas and the rise of the ‘common’ reader. Paine ensured his terrorist credentials with the publication of the Rights of Man (1791-2), but this talk will focus on his other massively subversive book, Age of Reason (1795), a study in ‘infidel’ […]