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Jad Adams

 Welcome to my website

Welcome. I am a historian working as an author and an independent television producer. I have specialised in work on radical characters from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and 'the decadence' of the 1890s.  My books include biographies of Tony Benn (updated and re-released in 2025), of Gandhi, Emmeline Pankhurst and of the Nehru dynasty.   My most recent major book in the political field is Women and the Vote: A World History (OUP 2014). 
My most recent major work is Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives (Reaktion 2023).  Other literary work includes a biography of Kipling (2005) Madder Music, Stronger Wine; The Life of Ernest Dowson (2000; re-release 2025) and Hideous Absinthe: History of the Devil in a Bottle (2004).  My television work includes biographies of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Kitchener and of characters from London's East End. I live in London and on the Greek island of Leros with fellow historian, Julie Peakman. This is a link to Julie's website: www.juliepeakman.co.uk

Contact Details


Email: jadadams@btinternet.com


Phone: 0793 9635014

 Current & recent work

'The Hotel d’Italie was in a back street away from the main thoroughfares of central London. Old Compton Street was known as a meeting place for exiles, particularly after the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871; the poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud had frequented pubs there. This was where guests at the launch of the Yellow Book came on 16 April 1894, past the fried fish shop, butcher, newsagent, grocer and Admiral Duncan pub....'

Decadent Women: 
Yellow Book Lives 

published in the UK by Reaktion Books and in the US by Chicago UP

     Decadent Women is about the women who contributed to the leading 1890s journal. It has been 20 years in the making (not continuously).  I have been publishing research leading to this book in academic journals.


     'Superb storytelling....this is a book that reflects impressive scholarship and research, but wears its scholarship lightly...I couldn't put it down.' - Prof Margaret Stetz


     'More than just a group biography, Decadent Women is an engaging cultural history of of the 1890s...While grounded in diligent scholarship, Adams' book liberates the women writers and artists of the "Yellow Nineties" from academic obscurity and makes the reader want to know them better.' -  Dr Jenny McAuley


       'Examining the lives of such authors as short story writer Ella D’Arcy, novelist Ménie Muriel Dowie, and biographer Ethel Colburn Mayne, Adams contends that though these women came from different social classes and countries, they shared a 'decadent' mindset (a 'catch-all term for challenges to the establishment consensus' in the 1890s) that manifested in their questioning of gender roles and writing frankly about sexuality and women’s struggles and desires. . . . Adams does a fine job of portraying how these authors pushed back against constrictive norms.'  — Publishers Weekly


        'In Decadent Women, Adams . . . traces the intersecting paths of the female writers, artists and sub-editors who contributed to the notorious Yellow Book, the most beautiful magazine of the 1890s. . . . He has been painstaking in his research, making use of diaries, letters and contemporary reminiscences. He is a good storyteller and there are many vivid anecdotes here, which will interest the general reader as well as devotees of the period.'  — Literary Review


      '[Decadent Women] charts a period in which ‘educated girls of any character’, in the words of Netta Syrett, who was one of them, ‘were asserting their right to independence if they could prove themselves capable of earning their own living. Or for that matter, even if they couldn’t or didn’t.’ The result of such assertions often proved, as Ménie Muriel Dowie, another Yellow Book contributor, put it, "rather a grotesque little mess of trying to rearrange life."'  — London Review of Books

     

       'Adams guides the reader expertly through the stages of The Yellow Book’s textual and physical production and vividly reconstructs its fractious, often female-dominated office politics from letters, diaries and company records. While grounded in diligent scholarship, Adams’s book liberates the women writers and artists of the ‘Yellow Nineties’ from academic obscurity, and makes the reader want to know them better.'  — Tablet

Academic publishing

Madder Music Stronger Wine

re-release


To commemorate the 125th anniversary since Dowson's death, I am re-releasing an updated version of my biography of the tragic poet under our own Meles Meles Marks label.


The book will be lanched at a Dowson Day arranged by the British Association of Decadence Studies at Goldsmiths' College on 21 February 2025


https://bads.gold.ac.uk/2025-dowson



            CAFE  EUROPA


My new novel, set on a Greek island, sees four young people looking for sun, sea and romance.  They find these, but they also find that the island has a hidden side as crime and corrupt politics reveal that nothing is what it seems.


Into this cultural complexity steps a naive refugee from the East whose involvement undermines the uneasy balance of north and south Europe.



Meles Meles Marks

Tony Benn: A Biography

Updated edition now available

I was the last person to have full access to the vast  Benn Archive which is now being catalogued at the British Library.  I had full access to the original Benn Diaries which (in unedited form) run to 15 million words.   I have updated the biography I first wrote, which was published by Macmillan in 1992,  to include 21st century events like the invasion of Iraq and Tony Benn's retirement from the House of Commons and his death.  This version is published by Biteback in 2025, the 100th anniversary of Tony Benn's birth.

Reviews

When Tony Benn died in January 2014, as well as radio and television comments on his life, I contributed a piece  to History and Policy on Tony Benn and the British Radical Tradition  and on the Benn Diaries for the OUP Blog.

In 2023 I contributed to a BBC Radio 4 Great Lives programme on Tony Benn https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001mc0c

Women and the Vote: A World History

This book starts recollecting a trip I made across America while I was a student and I encountered a huge statue of a woman in Wyoming which was declared to be the first place where a legislature gave women an equal vote - in 1869. The early provenance of women's voting intrigued me and led to many questions I deal with in this book. I returned to Wyoming to do some of the research.  

Women & the Vote is the first history looking at women and the vote throughout the world. I have been able to study startling new connections across time and national boundaries with biographical pictures of the dramatic lives of suffrage leaders in history including little-known activists from China, Latin America and Africa. I note the regional cultures and their different influence on women's politics, showing how in Catholic countries the image of the mother or beauty queen could prevail to political advantage where the earnest feminist failed.

It received a lot of attention, particularly in relation to the 2018 anniversary of some women getting the vote in the UK, such as The Lost World of the Suffragettes on BBC Radio 4 to which I contributed.

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Gandhi: 
Naked Ambition





Widely covered in the UK and Indian press including a piece I did in The Independent called Gandhi: Thrill of the Chaste
This book delineates Gandhi’s searing ambition, involving the relentless creation of an image from London dandy to naked wise man; his ruthless sacrifice of his family for his principles; and the political misjudgments that led to the tragedy of partition.

Gandhi: Naked Ambition sees Gandhi as a guru in the style of later popularisers of Indian ideas such as the Maharishi and Osho; and shows how he operated a similar control over every aspect of the lives of his followers. This book is able to offer the most explicit account yet of Gandhi’s sexual experiments with the wives of his followers and his teenage grand-nieces.  
Reviews
Madder Music, Stronger Wine:
The Life of Ernest Dowson




'Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and                                                                                                           mine
There fall they shadow, Cynara! thy breath was                                                                                                            shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
   Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been fauthful to thee, Cynara! in my                                                                                                              fashion...'

This was a product of my longstanding fascination with the 1890s decadent poet.  I expected the book to receive moderate attention, in fact it ended up being more widely reviewed than any of my other books, gaining coverage in almost every British newspaper and major US papers from San Francisco to New York.





Reviews
Hideous Absinthe: 
A History of the Devil in a Bottle







'L'absinthe bue un soir d'hiver 
Eclaire en vert l'âme enfumée'
In one century absinthe was transformed from the muse of artists, hymned by poets, the drink of the middle class, to become the queen of poisons which was responsible for all the ills of industrialisation and for France’s near defeat in the first weeks of World War One.

In this book I looked at the myths of absinthe and examined its influence on the artistic movements of the nineteenth century.

I was interviewed on the history of absinthe for a BBC Radio 4 programme: Absinthe Makes the Art Grow Fonder.
Reviews
Pankhurst


'There has been no more paradoxical figure in British politics than Emmeline Pankhurst.  A century after the foundation of the Women's Social and Political Union dispute still rages between her supporters and detractors over the most basic questions: what did she achieve?  Was her activity a positive or a negative force in the struggle to secure the vote for women?...'
Kipling



'He was castigated as a misogynist though few writers of either sex have written so warmly about middle aged women.  He was accused or racism, though no other artist wrote with such intimacy of native life.  This new biography sheds light on the confused sexuality of a writer who adored men and was attracted to older or masculine women.'

The Banyan and Her Roots



I have been a friend of the liberal Indian publishing company Palimpsest for some time and I was pleased when they asked me to edit a collection of stories from writers in different parts of the Indian diaspora.








'The book, unlike any other in the recent past, captures authentically the malaise and aspirations of South Asian societies.



Writer Jad Adams, who has chosen the stories and edited them, says these are tales of anxious women and confused men, of relationships which start in the glow of love but end in a baffling clash of contradictory cultures; oppressive family relationships with overwhelming obligations; travellers feeling out of place in a new culture, but also being liberated in a new environment.

Of the 23 writers in the volume, 13 are women. Seven Pakistani writers have also made it to the book. There is a commonality of tone in the work of women writers from across the borders. They all stand up to patriarchy and reject war as a way for the neighbours to dominate each other. They are more concerned about the war going on for hundreds of years inside their homes. …'

       - Hindustan Times

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