Eccentric Lives And Peculiar Notions - Softcover

Michell, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747403538 ISBN 13: 9780747403531

Publisher: Penguin Group (UK) Ltd, 1989

Synopsis

Never has so much energy been poured into such oddly misbegotten ideas, inventions, enterprises and movements. The 22 individuals and groups documented in this book with such wit and sympathy represent the widest range of true eccentricity, including: - Persistent lover John Rutter Carden of Tipperary, who abducted an heiress - Sir Ian Stuart Knill of Burnham-on-Sea who claimed he was descended from King Arthur - Lady Blount of Kingston who surveyed the Bedford Levels to prove the Earth was flat - Colonel Sibthorp, MP for Lincoln, who opposed every Act and Reform in Parliament - Nesta Webster of Hertfordshire who (in the 1920s) invented Conspiracy Theory - Sir Francis Galton, whose crusaded for thoroughbred humans and pioneered Eugenics - Geoffrey Pyke from Suffolk, who invented battleships made of ice during WW1 - Comyns Beaumont who claimed the Holy Land was actually in Scotland - Edward Hine who created the myth that British people are the lost tribe of Israel - Amanda Fielding from London who invented trepanation - drilling a hole in your head! - Baconians v. Stratfordians - the strange legacy of the 'Bacon wrote Shakespeare' theorists * Well written, lively narrative non-fiction in short entertaining biographies of British eccentrics. Author lives in London.

About this title

Synopsis:

This is a book about people throughout history with obsessions of one sort or another. It describes Colonel Sibthorp, the manic reactionary who opposed every motion put before the house because it would alter, if only minutely, a constitution which had reached perfection. William Comyas Beaumont, one-time Fleet street editor who believed that a large scale conspiracy had hidden the real identity of the Holy Land, which was actually the British Isles. And on to the modern couple living in Pont street, Chelsea who believed that if only they could slice off the tops of their heads they would feel much better, and went ahead and did it, and died.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Group (UK) Ltd
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0747403538
• ISBN 13: 9780747403531
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272