From an obscure family in a small provincial town, Shakespeare had no formal education after the age of thirteen. His surviving handwriting consists of six signatures on legal documents. His will makes no mention of his books or manuscripts. His two daughters were illiterate. There is, in other words, a seemingly enormous gap between the meagreness of Shakespeare's background and his achievements as the greatest and most famous writer in the English language. Over the years, numerous 'candidates' have been proposed as the true author. Often dismissed by the orthodox Shakespeare establishment in Britain and America as crackpots, the Anti-Stratfordians, as they are known, have become increasingly visible and numerous during the past thirty years. Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays? provides a clear, objective guide to the Shakespeare authorship question by examining the strengths and deficiencies of the arguments for all of the candidates: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford; Sir Francis Bacon; Christopher Marlowe; William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby; Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland; Mary Sidney; Sir Henry Neville; and William Shakespeare himself. This book is a fascinating, comprehensive and up-to-date look at one of history's greatest mysteries.

Deals also with British antisemitism from Cromwell's time to the present. There were objections against the admission of Jews to England in 1655, as well as attempts to restrict their rights in the 17th-18th centuries. Discusses pre-World War I antisemitic writers (e.g. G.K. Chesterton, H. Belloc) and the eugenics movement. Racial antisemitism was almost non-existent before 1914. Antisemitism reached a peak in Britain in 1917-22, but it was milder than in other Western countries. Relates, also, to left-wing antisemitism between the two World Wars. Ch. 3 (pp. 280-363), "Anglo-Jewry and the Holocaust, 1933-1945", deals with the reactions of Jews and non-Jews to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. Nazi antisemitism aroused revulsion in British society, even among conservatives and pro-Germans. States that Britain did more for refugees from Germany than any other country. British Jewry did all it could to rescue Jews to the extent that it understood their situation. During the war and the hostilities in the Middle East, there was an upsurge of antisemitism in the country but it receded in the 1950s. Contends that antisemitism in Britain was always a marginal phenomenon.