Remarkable Rogues

Charles Kingston - Remarkable Rogues (1921)

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Librivox audio book


Might as well re-launch the blog with a true crime book before heading back to obscure classical writers and forgotten historians.  Kingston collects stories of then-recent criminals, noting that we "are content to behold crime through the eyes of our favourite journal and it is impossible to complain that the press does not cater fully for us in this respect."  If only he could have jumped a head a century.

The chapter headings include The Monte Carlo Trunk Murderess, The Bootmaker's Royal Wooing, Belle Star the Girl Bushranger, The Woman with the Fatal Eyes and The Secret Princess of Posen.  I've only skimmed this but Kingston isn't interested in journalism so much as straight storytelling, and though he claims to have made efforts to get the facts I have some doubts.  (One contemporary review says Kingston isn't up to the standard of William Roughead but then who is?)

I haven't been able to pin down the author except that in the space of a few years he is credited with several books - some are available digitally such as this one, Famous Morgantic Marriages (1919), Dramatic Days at the Old Bailey (1920) and Society Sensations (1922).  They all appear fairly similar in approach so my guess is was somebody who gave a try at writing, produced some popular works, then returned to whatever he did before.

Five Books

direct link to Five Books

Before restarting the blog it seems worth posting about a site that probably will interest anybody who comes here.

There's no shortage of sites recommending books or ones with various topical lists.  What makes Five Books special is that there are long, substantial interviews about the lists and even more surprisingly interviews conducted by people who actually have read the books and (usually) understand the subjects.  It makes for fascinating reading, even on topics that you might not otherwise care about and don't plan to read the books.  (That would be neuroscience for me.)  There are a few duds but mostly well worth while.

As a bonus they've just added a section of user-submitted lists which I honestly expected to be a disaster (you've seen a website comments section right?).  However it turns out to present some welcome expansion in subjects - Senegal, Islam, US Occultism, Blake Scholarship, travel books about India, Swiss fiction, Habsburg Empire and so on.  There are no interviews for these, just short blurbs.

Some lists/interviews of particular interest:

Peter Brown on Late Antiquity

Sarah Bakewell on Existentialism

Alex Ross on Writing About Music

Marina Warner on Fairy Tales

Mary Beard on Ancient History in Modern Life

Andrei Codrescu on Fantasical Tales

Greil Marcus on Rock Music

Enrique Vila-Matas on Books that Shaped Him

Robert Irwin on Classics of Arabic Literature

Andrew Sarris on Film Criticism

Stanley Wells on Shakespeare's Plays

Hermione Lee on Virginia Woolf

Lynn Hunt on the French Revolution

Angela Hobbs on the Presocratics

The blog returns!

After a lengthy, unplanned break the blog will be back this weekend.  There are a few changes, major and minor.

First, there's a new name - The Magic Mirror in the Palace of Books.  The old name is remaining in the subheading to avoid confusion and in case I want to revert at some time.

I had never particularly liked the blunt description of the original name but was never able to come up with anything better.  The Magic Mirror in the Palace of Books is one of the English titles of Cefu Yuangui (though apparently not an actual translation) and seemed to fit.  Cefu Yuangui is a Chinese leishu, a term often translated as "encyclopedia" though the actual works aren't quite that.  They're much closer to enormous anthologies or even small libraries.  Roughly what I'd imagine the Britannica would have been like if edited by Edmund Wilson - why shouldn't the entry on Isaac Newton include big chunks of his Principia?  Maybe even the entire work?  Why write an entry on James II and the Revolution of 1688 when you can just toss in Macaulay?

Next change is posts will be weekly.  This had been the original plan but there's so much to cover I instead started with posting every other day.  There's no way I could have kept that up - I think the longest stretch was about six weeks.  Weekly posts will be more likely to be on time and there's still room for something during the week. (In fact one mid-week post is already scheduled.)

The post formats will be slightly changed.  In the past I always used the title of the book as the post title even when that was a bit vague or didn't give a good idea what the post is about.  Foolish consistencies, you know?  So now more descriptive post titles.  Previous posts were also mostly one per book with the occasional associated work.  I have at least one compendium post already written.

There's still some cleanup for older posts that may never happen.  In particular the image links are broken on several of them but that's very time consuming to fix.  Most of the recent posts had direct uploads so that shouldn't be a problem.