Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery

"This book came out at the moment when many of us in Britain were busy marking the bicentenary of the end of the slave trade in 2007. In all Adam’s books he places character and biography at the very heart of his stories and this is another example of him doing that brilliantly. People are perhaps hard-wired to love story, so putting people at the absolute centre of a narrative is a very powerful way to write. In some ways I think maybe it took an American, an outsider to the British story of race, slavery and abolition, to see these characters afresh. Adam looked again at people like William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson and tried to discover who they were, and through their biographies he explored the bigger, overarching and convoluted story of the rise and ultimate fall of British slavery. I admire Adam as a writer enormously. I met him in San Francisco a few years ago, and rather unprofessionally I sort of interrogated him about how he writes, asking him for lots of professional secrets. He’s quite a remarkable guy. He was very early on involved in campaigning against apartheid in South Africa and was a civil rights campaigner in the United States. He lives and breathes these stories and I think this comes across in his writing."