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Podcast: Arts & Ideas
Episode: Politician and Pioneer
Description: The colourful life of Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh overturns everything we think we know about disabled people’s lives in the 19th century. Born without hands and feet, he was an adventurous traveller and a Member of Parliament, a tiger-hunting landowner whose attempts to resist the rising tide of Irish nationalism were ultimately defeated, and whose amazing career has been largely forgotten. But how did his first biographer meet the challenge of writing his life?New Generation Thinker Clare Walker Gore of the University of Cambridge discusses the gaps in his published biography and what attitudes they reflect....