Just published is Kirsten McKenzie’s Imperial Underworld: An Escaped Convict and the Transformation of the British Colonial Order (Cambridge University Press) which argues that the colourful and salacious aspects of colonial administrations cannot be separated from the real business of political and social change. The book instead highlights the importance of taking gossip, paranoia, factional infighting and political spin seriously to show the extent to which ostensibly marginal figures and events influenced the transformation of the nineteenth-century British Empire.