Londonderry Affair

While shopping in a Virginia suburb, First Lady Kathleen Maguire is accosted by a man she knew years ago in Belfast. Taken to a remote location, she is invited to participate in secret peace talks designed to help bring peace to Northern Ireland. Over the objections of the Director of the FBI and others, President Kellan Maguire agrees to allow his wife to proceed to Derry to participate in the talks. The group is to include the prime ministers of Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland, but an assassination attempt on the former disrupts the proceedings. Back in the United States, the president's motives are questioned, and he soon faces impeachment charges for allowing his wife to participate in the secret mission. Once again Kathleen Maguire becomes the focal point of controversy, and it is her testimony before Congress that will determine the results of the investigation.

Two of the greatest financial fiascos of all time took place at the same time and were instigated by two acquaintances: the Mississippi Bubble, on which John Law at first made a vast fortune and gained sway over French finances; and the South Sea Bubble, launched by Law and Thomas Pitt, Jr., Lord Londonderry, his main partner in England. This book tells the story of these two financial schemes from the letters and accounts of two leading personalities. Larry Neal, a distinguished economic historian, highlights the rationality of each person and also finds that the primitive exchanges of the day, though informal and completely unregulated, actually performed reasonably well.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1867.

Letters between a colliery manager and his employer provide valuable evidence for the growth and development of the coal trade in north-east England. John Buddle (1773-1843), the most eminent coal viewer and mining engineer and manager of his day, worked for a number of different coal owners in North-East England. In particular, for over twenty years he acted as colliery manager for Charles Stewart, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry. In this capacity Buddle wrote to his employer more than 2,000 letters, of which this book provides a selection. They give not only a detailed, and at times almost a day-to-day account of the coal trade of the Tyne and Wear at a time when the industry was expanding rapidly, but also a discussion of Lord Londonderry's always difficult financial affairs, of his local political activities, and the general condition of the region in a period of change. Buddle emerges from these letters as a self-confident professional man with far-reaching ideas tempered by prudence, ready to speak his mind and by no means always agreeing with his aristocratic employer, though ultimately always bowing to his decisions; Londonderry is revealed as ambitious, willful, and incapable of living within his means. The letters reveal the sometimes troubled relationship between the twovery different men, one that came close to breaking-point in 1841, though the breach was repaired before Buddle's death in 1843; more widely, they paint a vivid picture of north-east England in the early nineteenth century, of its politics, its economy, and its social situation at a time of lively development. Anne Orde is a retired Senior Lecturer in History, University of Durham.