Great Pretenders
Great Pretenders

Author: Jan Bondeson

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2005-03-15

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780393326444

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Most countries have their own national mysteries that have never been solved, enigmatic figures who have disappeared, pretenders who have surfaced to claim their rights, and many of these are now in the realms of folklore and legend. However, in this study, six case studies are reopened and re-examined using modern historical and medical science, including DNA technology. Among those investigated by Bondeson are the fate of the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the identity of the German Kaspar Hauser, the faked death of Tsar Alexander I, and the alleged secret marriage of George III. A light-hearted read for the curious.

Identifying the English
Identifying the English

Author: Edward Higgs

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2011-10-06

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1441138013

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Personal identification is very much a live political issue in Britain and this book looks at why this is the case, and why, paradoxically, the theft of identity has become ever more common as the means of identification have multiplied. Identifying the English looks not only at how criminals have been identified - branding, fingerprinting, DNA - but also at the identification of the individual with seals and signatures, of the citizen by means of passports and ID cards, and of the corpse. Beginning his history in the medieval period, Edward Higgs reveals how it was not the Industrial Revolution that brought the most radical changes in identification techniques, as many have assumed, but rather the changing nature of the State and commerce, and their relationship with citizens and customers. In the twentieth century the very different historical techniques have converged on the holding of information on databases, and increasingly on biometrics, and the multiplication of these external databases outside the control of individuals has continued to undermine personal identity security.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

Author: Kate Summerscale

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2010-06-05

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0802779298

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The New York Times bestselling account of the real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction. In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land. At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking, as Kate Summerscale relates in her scintillating new book, that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher. Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable--that someone within the family was responsible for the murder of young Saville Kent. Without sufficient evidence or a confession, though, his case was circumstantial and he returned to London a broken man. Though he would be vindicated five years later, the real legacy of Jonathan Whicher lives on in fiction: the tough, quirky, knowing, and all-seeing detective that we know and love today . . . from the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a provocative work of nonfiction that reads like a Victorian thriller, and in it Kate Summerscale has fashioned a brilliant, multilayered narrative that is as cleverly constructed as it is beautifully written.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy

Author: Claire McEachern

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-08-08

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1107470137

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This revised and updated Companion acquaints the student reader with the forms, contexts, critical and theatrical lives of the ten plays considered to be Shakespeare's tragedies. Thirteen essays, written by leading scholars in Britain and North America, address the ways in which Shakespearean tragedy originated, developed and diversified, as well as how it has fared on stage, as text and in criticism. Topics covered include the literary precursors of Shakespeare's tragedies, cultural backgrounds, sub-genres and receptions of the plays. The book examines the four major tragedies and, in addition, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. Essays from the first edition have been fully revised to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship; the bibliography has been extensively updated; and four new chapters have been added, discussing Shakespearean form, Shakespeare and philosophy, Shakespeare's tragedies in performance, and Shakespeare and religion.