Prince Albert Victor, known to his family as 'Eddy', was the eldest child of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. This is the story of Prince Eddy's alleged involvement in a Victorian cause célèbre - the Cleveland Street brothel case. The discovery of this homosexual brothel in 1889 led to an extraordinary cover-up by the British government - a cover-up which is explicable only in the light of Prince Eddy's involvement. Working from original sources (including the files of the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Esher Papers), Theo Aronson has written the first full account of the strange life of Prince Eddy, setting it in perspective against a vivid backcloth of the astonishingly active homosexual underworld during the last decades of Queen Victoria's reign. Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld explores Prince Eddy's upbringing, his university and military careers, his curious personality, his alleged "secret marriage", his links with the Jack the Ripper murders, his early death and, above all, his sexual orientation. For it was this that linked the young prince's name to the Cleveland Street Scandal. Praise for Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld: 'Students of the erotic will love this book, and so will royal-watchers, but arbiters of sexual purity should hate it, for Mr. Aronson displays an underground culture that exposed its judges as upright liars' - New York Times Book Review

Shows and describes locations in London related to the lives and careers of the Beatles, including concert, recording, and film sites.

This is the untold story of how some of Germany's top aristocrats contributed to Hitler's secret diplomacy during the Third Reich, providing a direct line to their influential contacts and relations across Europe, especially in Britain, where their contacts included the press baron and Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere and the future King Edward VIII. Using previously unexplored sources from Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and the USA, this book unravels the story of top-level go-betweens such as the Duke of Coburg, grandson of Queen Victoria, and the seductive Stephanie von Hohenlohe, who rose from a life of poverty in Vienna to become a princess and an intimate of Adolf Hitler. As Urbach shows, Coburg and other senior aristocrats were tasked with some of Germany's most secret foreign policy missions from the First World War onwards, culminating in their role as Hitler's trusted go-betweens, as he readied Germany for conflict during the 1930s and later, in the Second World War. Tracing what became of these high-level go-betweens in the years after the Nazi collapse in 1945, from prominent media careers to sunny retirements in Marbella, the book concludes with an assessment of their overall significance in the foreign policy of the Third Reich.

In this new edition of his landmark book, John Gross traces the shifting fortunes of the men who shaped literary opinion in England during the Victorian, Edwardian, and contemporary eras. He brings together famous or forgotten critics and editors-prophets, aesthetes, statesmen, dons, radicals, social climbers, idealists, gossipmongers, and literary lions-and explores not only their critical ideas but also their personalities, careers, social backgrounds, and politics. He looks at "the higher journalism;" the expansion of the reading public, the byways of British liberalism, and the rise of literature as an academic subject, and the impact of modernism. In all a remarkable survey, to which Mr. Gross has now added updates on several literary careers, the new style of critics who have evolved from the universities, and the dominant role of the media. "A brilliant account of English literary culture which is as engaging as it is illuminating"-Lionel Trilling. "Extremely readable.... The book is strewn with marvelous bits: deft aperçus, biographical portraits of great subtlety and force, wit, commonsensical intelligence everywhere. It is a book that no one who cares about the state of literature can afford to neglect."-Joseph Epstein.

"Marking the third centenary of the office of Prime Minister, this book tells its extraordinary story, explaining how and why it has endured longer than any other democratic political office in world history. Sir Anthony Seldon, historian of Number 10 Downing Street, explores the lives and careers, loves and scandals, successes and failures, of all our great Prime Ministers. From Robert Walpole and William Pitt the Younger, to Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher, Seldon discusses which of our Prime Ministers have been most effective and why. He reveals the changing relationship between the Monarchy and the office of the Prime Minister in intimate detail, describing how the increasing power of the Prime Minister in becoming leader of Britain coincided with the steadily falling influence of the Monarchy. This book celebrates the humanity and frailty, work and achievement, of these 55 remarkable individuals, who averted revolution and civil war, leading the country through times of peace, crisis and war."

Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once observed that the ideal judge must possess three qualities--all of which are disinterestedness. But as David Pannick points out in this irreverent, informative, and highly entertaining volume, not all judges live up to Justice Frankfurter's standard. One American judge, when asked by a lawyer of Japanese descent for more time to prepare a case, shot back, "How much time did you give us at Pearl Harbor?" Others go to the opposite extreme, uninterestedness, and fall asleep during the trial, or knit, or read the paper. One English judge fell asleep so often that barristers would drop huge law books to the floor to wake him up again. Full of such illustrative examples and anecdotes, Judges offers a revealing portrait of the judicial systems of America and England. It is a vastly amusing book, but it has a serious purpose--to make us think more critically about officials whom we elect for life, who have the power to strike down laws, and whose mistakes, even if later reversed, can have a devastating impact on the people involved. How are judges selected? Is it wise to select supposedly impartial judges from the ranks of lawyers, who spend their careers in highly partisan and heated argument for one side of an issue? Should a judge who has spent his entire career in corporate law be allowed to hear cases in criminal court, as sometimes happens? (One English judge, appointed to the bench after a successful career in libel practice, claimed it was "fun trying Chancery matters of which I had no experience at all"--but how the litigants felt is another matter.) How are judges disciplined when they misbehave? And what changes are needed in this important but hitherto neglected area of government? Judges have a weighty responsibility; they repeatedly do what most of us seek to avoid: make decisions. These decisions can have serious consequences: a man may go to prison, a women may lose her house or the custody of her children, or an entire segment of the population may lose their civil rights. Pannick's light touch does not deflect from this book's serious aim--to remind people that it is vital to subject judges to the same critical standards to which the other branches of government are held.

At the end of the millennium, the leading British industry magazine, The Bookseller, selected the ten people who had most influenced its century. Tom Maschler—described as "the most important publisher in Britain; the most innovative, adventurous, and newsworthy"—was one of them. It went on to say that for nearly 20 years, "he made publishing glamorous." Over the course of his career, Maschler launched the careers of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Gabriel García Márquez, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Bruce Chatwin, among others. From the party where Norman Mailer stabbed his wife to the porch where Ernest Hemingway shot himself, this frank and fascinating memoir affords a rare glimpse into the golden days of British publishing. An extraordinary literary memoir by one great publishers of the 20th century.

Milton Shulman has been a much-loved and outspoken arts critic for the Express and then the Evening Standard for forty years. These are his witty, anecdotal memoirs on the careers, interviews and encounters over the years. His broadcasts on Stop the Week as well as frequent radio and TV appearances have made him a nationwide figure.

This book explores how recollections and traces of the reign of Richard III survived a century and more to influence the world and work of William Shakespeare. In Richard III, Shakespeare depicts an era that had only recently passed beyond the horizon of living memory. The years between Shakespeare's birth in 1564 and the composition of the play in the early 1590s would have seen the deaths of the last witnesses to Richard's reign. Yet even after the extinction of memory, traces of the Yorkist era abounded in Elizabethan England - traces in the forms of material artefacts and buildings, popular traditions, textual records, and administrative and religious institutions and practices. Other traces had notoriously disappeared, not least the bodies of the princes reputedly murdered in the Tower, and the King's own body, which remained lost until its apparent rediscovery in the summer of 2012. Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III charts the often complex careers of these pieces of the past over the course of a century framed on one side by the historical reign of Richard III (1483-85) and on the other by Shakespeare's play. Drawing on recent work in fields including archaeology, memory studies, and material biography, this book offers a fresh approach to the cultural history of the Tudor era, as well as a fundamentally new interpretation of the wellsprings and preoccupations of Richard III. The final emphasis is not only on what Shakespeare does with the traces of Richard's reign but also on what those traces do through Shakespeare - the play, in spite of its own pessimistic assumptions about history, has become the medium whereby certain fragments and remains of a long-lost world live on into the present day.