Peccadillo At The Palace

It’s 1887, and Annie and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show are invited to Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebration in London, England. But their long journey across the Atlantic takes a turn for the worst when the queen’s royal servant ends up dead and Annie’s husband, Frank Butler, falls suspiciously ill. Annie soon discovers that the two events are connected—and may possibly be precursors to an assassination attempt on the queen. In London, it becomes clear there is rampant unrest in the queen’s kingdom—the Irish Fenian Brotherhood, as well as embittered English subjects, are teeming in the streets. But amid the chaos, even while she prepares for the show, Annie is determined to find the truth. With the help of a friend and reporter, Emma Wilson, the renowned poet Oscar Wilde, and the famous socialite Lillie Langtry, Annie sets out to hunt down the queen’s enemies—and find out why they want to kill England’s most beloved monarch.

Ever since the publication of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians in 1918 it has been fashionable to ridicule the great figures of the nineteenth century. From the longreigning monarch herself to the celebrated writers, philanthropists and politicians of the day, the Victorians have been dismissed as hypocrites and frauds - or worse. Yet not everyone in the twentieth century agreed with Strachey and his followers. To a handful of eccentrics born during Victoria's reign, the nineteenth century remained the greatest era in human history: a time of high culture for the wealthy, 'improvement' for the poor, and enlightened imperial rule for the 400 million inhabitants of the British Empire. They were, to friend and foe alike, 'the last Victorians' - relics of a bygone civilisation. In this daring group biography, W. Sydney Robinson explores the extraordinary lives of four of these Victorian survivors: the 'Puritan Home Secretary', William Joynson-Hicks (1865-1932); the 'Gloomy Dean' of St Paul's Cathedral, W. R. Inge (1860-1954); the belligerent founder of the BBC, John Reith (1889-1971), and the ultra-patriotic popular historian and journalist Arthur Bryant (1899- 1985). While revealing their manifold foibles and eccentricities, Robinson argues that these figures were truly great - even in error.

Sequel to "Grand days".

Alaric’s Gold is full of suspense that will leave readers wondering what’s reality and what’s fiction.

Housemaid Jane Bee's summer duties run to dusting the props for a week of pageantry at Windsor Castle, the Queen's favorite haunt. But the Investiture of the new Knights of the Garter ends up combining pomp with a extremely unpleasant circumstance.... Mild-mannered art curator Roger Pettibon is found dead, a ceremonial sword in his back and a Royal Garter around his knee. The police are quick to arrest moody Court painter Victor Fabiani, at work on a portrait of the regal face that launched a billion postage stamps. But Fabiani's confession--despite its story of art forgery and blackmail--doesn't ring true to Jane. Nor to Her Majesty, who dispatches her on a discreet inquiry among the cream of society gathered for the Ascot races. And, as Jane traces the twisty lineage of more than one family, Windsor's ancient battlements witness a second death--and their second ordeal in five years, by fire and water....

Eunuchs and Castrati examines the enduring fascination among historians, literary critics, musicologists, and other scholars around the figure of the castrate. Specifically, the book asks what influence such fascination had on the development and delineation of modern ideas around sexuality and physical impairment. Ranging from Greco-Roman times to the twenty-first century, Katherine Crawford brings together travel accounts, diplomatic records, and fictional sources, as well as existing scholarship, to demonstrate how early modern interlocutors reacted to and depicted castrates. She reveals how medicine and law operated to maintain the privileges of bodily integrity and created and extended prejudice against those without it. In consequence, castrates were constructed as gender deviant, disabled social subjects and demarcated as inferior. Early modern cultural loci then reinforced these perceptions, encouraging an othering of castrates in public contexts. These extensive, almost obsessive accounts of appearance, social propensities, and gender characteristics of castrated men reveal the historical lineages of sexual stigma and hostility towards gender non-normative and physically impaired persons. For Crawford, they are the roots of sexual and physical prejudices that remain embedded in the western experience today.