for that. Wherever it has flourished, in sixteenth-century Germany, seventeenth-century England, or nineteenth-century Scotland, pamphlet literature has always indicated a struggle for the mind. It is thought tailored to action. It may educate and divert; but its primary concern is to challenge its readers’ assumptions, to inculcate specific attitudes and to encourage particular commitments or actions. The reader becomes the juror in a trial in which the whole of society is in the dock, and where