In this study Michael J. Turner affirms that historians have concentrated on the positive views of America held by British radicals and have neglected their more negative attitudes. He points out that among British radicals there were both ardent admirers of the United States and also persistent denigrators. Turner sets out to redress the old historiographical imbalance, but he also looks more generally at British radicals' views of America. In the process he provides useful summaries of a host of secondary works, which relate directly or indirectly to the subject. He also deals with the major political issues that led radicals to criticize America, most notably slavery. But he notes that many radicals avoided dwelling on slavery because it conflicted with their desire to present the United States as a workers' paradise. Turner also pays considerable attention to the radicals' criticism of American protectionism and tariff policy, which was a persistent sore in Anglo-American relations. Other issues covered, in a generally informed and balanced way, include Irish Fenianism, Canada, the Alabama claims and social reform.

Liberty and Liberticide, however, lacks a consistent focus. Turner does not define who these radicals were, and he includes material about the stance of distinctly un-radical British ministers on relations with the United States. There are also sections on American attitudes to Britain, which are not very relevant. The coverage of radical opinion and action is patchy and distinctly sparse at the parliamentary level. Unsurprisingly, there is a heavy emphasis on the Civil War era but relatively little on the opening and closing decades of the century. He says very little about Jeremy Bentham—the intellectual father of pro-American radicalism—or about William Cobbett who, though an idiosyncratic radical, was very widely read. Even Richard Cobden and John Bright, the leading admirers of America in the earlier Victorian period, get only occasional attention. By contrast, Turner devotes much space to a relatively minor figure: Thomas Perronet Thompson. Thompson was a wealthy banker who had a modest parliamentary career representing Hull and then Bradford. But he left Parliament before the outbreak of the Civil War, and his views on that conflict were largely confined to the columns of a local newspaper, the Bradford Advertiser. Thompson was a strong opponent of slavery and tariffs, which largely accounts for his critical views of the United States. There is no evidence, however, that his opinions were particularly influential. Indeed Turner, in his entry on Thompson, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, made no reference to his views on America.

Liberty and Liberticide lacks a comparative dimension and a developed conclusion. There is little assessment of how radical attitudes to the United States changed over the course of the century. Turner does not really explain why the radicals' belief that America was a “beacon of liberty” (253) declined in the later nineteenth century despite the emancipation of the slaves. A comparison between the radicals' critique of America and that of moderate Liberals and Conservatives would have been instructive. More attention could have been paid to the imperial dimension of British radical thinking. The Indian Mutiny and the Jamaican revolt get a little attention, but there is no reference to the Venezuela boundary dispute at the end of the century. The impact of the rise of the Irish home rule party in the later nineteenth century and American support for it is also completely neglected. All too often Turner simply repeats his opening mantra: that some radicals loved America while others loathed it. That conclusion, while factually correct, underplays the extent to which most radicals regarded America, despite its shortcomings, as a polity that they admired even if they did not seek to reproduce it in Britain.