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They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper (2015)

by Bruce Robinson

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2185124,648 (3.52)7
For over a hundred years, the mystery of Jack the Ripper has been a source of unparalleled fascination and horror, spawning an army of obsessive theorists and endless volumes purporting to finally reveal the identity of the brutal murderer who terrorized Victorian England. But what if there was never really any mystery at all? What if the Ripper was always hiding in plain sight, deliberately leaving a trail of clues to his identity for anyone who cared to look, while cynically mocking those who were supposedly attempting to bring him to justice? In They All Love Jack, the award-winning film director and screenwriter Bruce Robinson exposes the cover-up that enabled one of history's most notorious serial killers to remain at large. More than twelve years in the writing, this is no mere radical reinterpretation of the Jack the Ripper legend and an enthralling hunt for the killer. A literary high-wire act reminiscent of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, it is an expressionistic journey through the cesspools of late-Victorian society, a phantasmagoria of highly placed villains, hypocrites, and institutionalized corruption. Polemic forensic investigation and panoramic portrait of an age, underpinned by deep scholarship and delivered in Robinson's inimitably vivid and scabrous prose, They All Love Jack is an absolutely riveting and unique book, demolishing the theories of generations of self-appointed experts-the so-called Ripperologists-to make clear, at last, who really did it; and, more important, how he managed to get away with it for so long.… (more)
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Showing 5 of 5
His theories are ludicrous – he doesn't so much ignore Occam's Razor as tie it to a weight and dump it in the Thames – but there's a small degree of amusement to be taken in that, and some of the historical detail is genuinely interesting. If you can ignore the sanctimony. ( )
  m_k_m | Mar 10, 2023 |
So badly written I was surprised the author is not an American ;) One of few books on JTR I will hesitate to ever read again. Someone punch the author. ( )
  ErikIancovici | May 12, 2022 |
Robinson makes an interesting case and is a fiery (though sometimes extremely un-PC) critic of the Victorian establishment, but this just feels like a slog most of the time. I would have deeply appreciated a royal family/Freemason/British justice system org chart to make sense of some parts. ( )
  skolastic | Feb 2, 2021 |
I bought this because I heard that it was viscerally angry in its refutation of the myth of Jack the Ripper. I think there needs to be more anger in history, especially anger directed against the disgusting and inhuman, and against corruption in high places. History written for an academic audience is often dry and inaccessible, while popular history sometimes lacks rigour. This book combines the rigour of academic research with the accessibility and humanity of popular history.

I didn't know that I was all that interested in Jack the Ripper until I started reading this book. Because of what it involves, the reason behind Robinson researching the story isn't revealed until a fifth of the way into the book. His reason is interesting but not vital to the passion he has for getting to the truth behind the mystery being infectious. His historian as raconteur style helped, but this is a pacey, gripping read regardless of Robinson's voice roaring out in incredulity at you. There were times when what Robinson was describing was so farcical that I could imagine it being made into a very entertaining satirical film.

This is one of the best books I have ever read. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me boil with rage, but most of all it consolidated things I have long held to be true into a coherent appraisal of the society we live in. ( )
  missizicks | Nov 29, 2016 |
A convincing case--but each case made in the past hundred or so years has been convincing in the telling. Certainly a massive amount of research has gone into unearthing this previously, so far as I can recall, never suspected candidate for the crimes. A bit confusing in its chronology and in bringing the Parnell conspiracy into the end. I confess I ran out of patience and only skimmed the last hundred pages. The work does incline me to believe in reincarnation--I'm not sure who Bruce Robinson was back in 1888--one of the victims of the Ripper, Florence Maybrick or some other victim of Victorian injustice, but he certainly hates the whole set of frock-coated hypocrites.
  ritaer | Jun 10, 2016 |
Showing 5 of 5
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Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches, and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame
A mechanised automaton.

Shelley, 1813
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In memory of Sergeant T J Hageboeck of the Los Angeles Police
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For over a hundred years, the mystery of Jack the Ripper has been a source of unparalleled fascination and horror, spawning an army of obsessive theorists and endless volumes purporting to finally reveal the identity of the brutal murderer who terrorized Victorian England. But what if there was never really any mystery at all? What if the Ripper was always hiding in plain sight, deliberately leaving a trail of clues to his identity for anyone who cared to look, while cynically mocking those who were supposedly attempting to bring him to justice? In They All Love Jack, the award-winning film director and screenwriter Bruce Robinson exposes the cover-up that enabled one of history's most notorious serial killers to remain at large. More than twelve years in the writing, this is no mere radical reinterpretation of the Jack the Ripper legend and an enthralling hunt for the killer. A literary high-wire act reminiscent of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, it is an expressionistic journey through the cesspools of late-Victorian society, a phantasmagoria of highly placed villains, hypocrites, and institutionalized corruption. Polemic forensic investigation and panoramic portrait of an age, underpinned by deep scholarship and delivered in Robinson's inimitably vivid and scabrous prose, They All Love Jack is an absolutely riveting and unique book, demolishing the theories of generations of self-appointed experts-the so-called Ripperologists-to make clear, at last, who really did it; and, more important, how he managed to get away with it for so long.

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