United Kingdom Books

This is a 1996 book covering the same subject as The Deluge: British Society and the First World War, by Arthur Marwick (read by me with much appreciation 20 Oct 1985), and anyone interested in Britain at home during the Great War will be caught up by this book. Especially worthwhile to me was Chapter 14, entitled "The Dead, the Living, and the Living Dead" which considers memorials and observances of the men who served in the War. An especially attractive feature of DeGroot's style is his frequent quoting from wartime poetry. For instance, I was struck by these evocative lines quoted from Ivor Gurney:

He's gone, and all our plans
Are useless indeed;
We'll walk no more on Cotswold
Where the sheep feed
Quietly and take no heed.

There is an excellent bibliography and I counted 24 books therein which I have read. But of course there are books therein which I would like to read, if I live long enough--as is always true in a good bibliography in a book on a fascinating subject such as the subject of this book.

I have all three in the set. The pictures and info are out of this world. volume two is my personal favorite but all three are great.

Blood Feud by Harry Potter is a great book of the 16th century family rivalry between the Stewarts and the Gordons. More specifically, the Earls of Moray and Earls of Huntly are the focus of the book. Mr. Potter shows how the Highlands have always been a turbulent region of struggles between families for power, money and land.

He starts out with the 4th Earl of Huntly and 1st Earl of Moray, the good regent who were both grandsons of King James IV. They both vied for control of the realm during Queen Mary of Scots reign. The Gordons were Catholic and the Earl of Moray was a champion of the reformed faith otherwise known as the Protestant faith. Then we see the continuation between the 5th Earl of Huntly and the regent.

The meat of the book surrounds the 6th Earl of Huntly and the 2nd Earl of Moray. This chapter of the feud leads to the murder of the 2nd Earl of Moray who is immortalized in the Scottish ballad of the murder of "the Bonny Earl of Moray". We see that George Gordon, 6th Earl of Huntly is a staunch supporter of the monarchy, now King James VI, and practically a vice regent in the Scottish Highlands but still Catholic. He collides with the upstart James Stewart, 2nd Earl of Moray. James Stewart is Earl of Moray in right of his wife, Elizabeth daughter of the Good Regent. James Stewart is from a lesser branch of the Stewarts descended from the Albany Stewarts. James proves to be a far less of an Earl and Stewart then his famous Father-in-Law. Despite this he is still the King's kin and a protestant. His family is relentless in seeking to avenge his murder. King James must mediate this long term family feud between his family and his friend to keep it from interfering with his accession to the English throne.

In the end the Earl of Huntly is created a Marquis but looses much of his former power and glory due to the murder and his keeping with the Catholic faith. The 3rd Earl of Moray and son of the murdered James becomes Lieutenant of the North of Scotland and marries the Earl of Huntly's daughter, thus ending the feud for good.

I really enjoyed this book. It was interesting to see a side of Scottish history that previously had been shadowed by Queen Mary's troubled life and King James accession to the English throne. It was nice to stay focused in Scotland for a change when most of the attention shifts to London's stage at this time in history.

Blood Feud is a must for the Scottish History enthusiasts.

I'm a big fan of the forensic programs on Court TV, and I always check the date of the featured crime (almost always murder and/or rape) to see if it occurred before or after DNA testing became common in the United States. If it occurred after 1992, the perp is usually doomed. Even decades-old cases can be solved if blood/semen/saliva samples were properly stored from the crime scene. According to a prophecy in the weekly "New Scientist," there will soon be kits available that will allow police to process DNA samples in less than two hours.

In "The Blooding," former policeman, Joseph Wambaugh writes about the first serial killer who was caught and convicted through the use of DNA testing: two teenage girls in the English village of Narborough were brutally raped and murdered in 1983 and 1986, and it took four years, a scientific breakthrough, and the blood of 5,000 men to capture the killer, Colin Pitchfork. DNA testing also freed the suspect who police had already jailed for the crime.

On September 10, 1984, at nearby Leicester University, Dr. Alec Jeffreys (now Sir Alec) discovered that each human being (except for identical twins) has a unique genetic profile. At first, his DNA profiling technique was used to sort out immigration cases. Then the Leicestershire constabulary became familiar with DNA 'fingerprinting' and collected blood from over 5,000 men in the ultimately successful search for their murderer.

(By 2004, the UK had a national database of 2.5 million genetic profiles from convicted criminals. Statistics show that 38% of all crimes are detected where DNA has been loaded onto the UK national database, compared with a 24% detection rate overall. And 48% of burglaries are detected where DNA has been loaded onto the database, compared with a 14% detection rate for burglaries overall.

Nowadays, even British bus drivers are issued DNA testing kits to help catch passengers who spit at them.)

Wambaugh does not spend much time exploring the scientific aspects of the Narborough Village murders. He tells the interwoven stories of the victims, their families, the murderer, and most especially the policemen who were involved in the hunt.

From the shadowy paths that wound past the grounds of the local psychiatric hospital to the ancient, smoke-filled pubs where the villagers spent their free hours, this author will have you living and breathing the horror of these crimes. There are a few of the patented Wambaugh belly laughs as the Leicestershire police invent their own techniques for 'blooding' the local men. One of my favorite scenes takes place after Colin Pitchfork is apprehended, and he insists on telling his bored interrogators his whole life story before he will confess to his crimes.

Everyone comes to life in a Wambaugh story, but most especially the policemen.

I have never been able to pick up one of this author's books without reading it through to the end, and "The Blooding" is no exception.

anyone interested in the bloomsbury group - vanessa bell & duncan grant should definitely add it to their collection

Whether visiting London for your first time or you feel you know it very well, this is a brilliant starting point to determining which museums are worthy of your time. Blue Guide is easy to read and navigate. It's very objective in its presentation. It alphabetically lists museums and galleries from the world famous to small hidden treasures and describes them in very good detail, whether it takes one or twenty pages. If you only take one book to London, take this. The concierge and free (or cheap)resources available there (like Time Out magazine) can help you with shopping, navigating public transport, dining, performing arts, etc. It will not only help determine which museums, but you'll know which bits of the museums you'll most want to see.

A very concise and practical source of information about medicines and their use.

Body 115: The mystery of the last victim of the King's Cross Fire by Paul Chambers is a fascinating story of London's 1987 King's Cross Underground station fire. 31 people died in the horrible blaze, but one individual remained unidentified for over 15 years. Chambers looks at the fire and the endless efforts of England's authorities to give a name to the final victim.

Contents: Flashover; Rescue and Recovery; Identifying Characteristics; Dr. West's Examinations; The Search for Names; Inquest; The Unidentified Body; Sugita No. 5; A Lone Fingerprint; Do You Know This Man?; The Public Hearing; Vagrancy; Dentures; Accusations and Recriminations; Missing Persons; The Itinerant Seaman; The Mystery of Mr Brown; The Perfect Candidate?; Unconvential Detectives; New Leads; "Some Sort of Closure"; Epilogue; Notes and Sources; Biblography; Index

The story begins with a random (though stupid) act that occurred numerous times each day... Someone lit up their cigarette on the wooden escalators and dropped the match off to the side. Normally the match would go out, but this time it slipped through a crack, landed in a grease/fluff trough, and started to burn. 20 minutes later, the fire had reached the flashover point and anyone left in the area was doomed to die. Once the fire was extinquished, the search for bodies began. 31 victims were found, and the gruesome task of identification started. Due to the intense heat of the fire, many of the bodies were charred beyond recognition, and personal items were nothing but ashes. Incredibly, officials were able to put names to all but one body in relatively short order. But it was that one body, referred to as "body 115", that led to a 15 year mystery.

Rather than just a narrative about body 115, Chambers takes the reader through the different forensic techniques and their history. Rather than just talk about matching fingerprints, you learn how fingerprinting was born and developed as a crime investigation technique. You learn about how DNA profiling evolved and figured into this case. There was also an attempt to recreate facial construction using individuals who broke ground in that area. Again, you'll learn about how that all came to be.

Body 115 is not overly dramatic, nor does it seem to suffer from 20-20 hindsight. It's a well-written story of a horrible event in London's history, and I really couldn't put it down.

Gallagher attempts to organize British Victorian novels and economic criticism with two well-defined conceptual tools: bioeconomics and somaeconomics. The first covers those concerned with looking at Victorian economic writings from the vantage point of life and death (Malthus), while the latter follows the lines of utilitarianism initiated by Bentham and having to do with questions of pleasure and pain. These concepts are applied to the developments (and rejections) of political economy over the span of the XIXth century. What was most helpful to me is her use of these concepts in relation to her readings of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (bioeconomic) and Hard Times (somaeconomic) while comparing these novels to the work of John Ruskin (Munera Pulveris,1871 is used to help elucidate Dickens's last novel Our Mutual Friend).

Gallagher has a great skill in combining her grasp of theory in both economics and literature to her sound readings of Malthus, Ricardo, Ruskin, Dickens, and Eliot. There are other treats as well. Throughout the book she includes excellent observations on other writers (i.e. Herbert Spencer) that generally don't receive much attention. Gallagher states in her introduction that students of literature (esp. from the early XXthc. to the present) have generally overlooked the great political economists of the XIXth century in part because of the "packaging" of their thought as ideological, irrelevant, or simply useless. Such labels should never prevent us from engaging with these texts. This practice can be noted even in editing practices, where little or no information is given about economic issues that determine the outcome of realist novels. Here I would signal a great exception in some British editing practices, esp. those influenced by Ian Small. Today we can no longer afford to dismiss economic thought from our analyses (nor should we have in the past!) of literary works and certainly not from our editing practices. To do so is essentially to misread, or to cause to misread, and thereby to treat the Victorians unhistorically. Any Victorianist should know this. When I began looking at some of the anthologies from two or more decades ago I find small pieces from Ruskin, Morris, Marx, and Engels. Rarely Smith, Ricardo, or Jevons. The new economic criticism does not ignore these "Other" contributions to the development of economics. Gallagher's readings attempt to go beyond simple models of production, distribution, and consumer economics to consider the effects of other economic thought as well.

Gallagher does not treat the late XIXth century with as much detail as she does the High Victorian period. For those interested in the period following 1871 (the year that marks the shift, the "Marginalist Revolution") I would recommend (for late British) Regenia Gagnier and Ian Small. Walter Benn Michaels (The Gold Standard) is still the best for late XIXth c. American literature and economics. I also highly recommend Gallagher's The Industrial Revolution of English Fiction (1988) which will provide a broader context for The Body Economic.

Academic accounts of regional conflicts are often dry and tedious reads. Dr. van Hartesveldt's retelling of the history of this conflict is engaging and accessible. He gives life to the stories of the men who fought in this bitter struggle and provides an understanding of the importance of the Boer war in the greater story of the rise and fall of the British empire. An enjoyable and enlightening read.