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Lives that Never Grow Old Part of a radical new series --edited by Richard Holmes -- that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography. Johnson's book is a biographical masterpiece, still thrilling to read and vividly alive. When he first came to London, young Samuel Johnson was befriended by the flamboyant poet, playwright and blackmailer, Richard Savage. Walking the backstreets at night, he learned Savage's extraordinary story -- supposedly persecuted by a 'cruel mother', sentenced to death for a murder in a brothel, appointed Volunteer Poet Laureate to the Queen, and finally broken and outcast. With this moving and intimate account, Johnson created a brilliant black comedy of 18th-century Grub Street which revolutionised English biography by its psychological realism. Yet Savage's destructive charm and delusions of grandeur sometimes even threatened to entangle Johnson himself.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

The Life of Mr Richard Savage was the first important book by an unknown Grub Street hack, Samuel Johnson, who would later become the most celebrated British writer of the late 1700s. Richard Savage (1697-1743) was a poet, playwright, and satirist who claimed to be the illegitimate son of a late earl and to have been denied his inheritance and viciously persecuted by his mother. He was urbane, charming, a brilliant conversationalist, but also irresponsible and impulsive. His role in a tavern brawl almost led him to the gallows, though his life was saved by an eleventh-hour pardon by the King. Over time he attracted many supporters, practically all of whom he managed to alienate by the time of his death in a debtors' prison in Bristol. Johnson, who had been friends with Savage for a little over a year, drew on published documents and his own memories of Savage to produce one of the first great English biographies.The edition is supplemented by other writings by Johnson, a selection of Savage's prose and verse, contemporary and posthumous responses to Savage and to Johnson's biography, and selections by Johnson's first two major biographers, John Hawkins and James Boswell. A discussion of factual errors in Johnson's account help the reader place the Life and the supplementary texts in their historical and intellectual contexts.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Preface
• Robin Hood : 'that celebrated English outlaw'
• Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough, and William of Cloudeslie
• Gamaliel Ratsey : the repentant highwayman
• Captain James Hind : the royalist highwayman
• Claude Du Vall : the ladies' highwayman
• Sawney Beane : 'a picture of human barbarity'
• Rob Roy : 'the highland rogue'
• Jack Sheppard : the original 'Jack the lad'
• Jonathan Wild : London's first mob boss
• Dick Turpin : the knight of the road
• Dr William Dodd : the rogue clergyman
• Conclusion.

For as long as human societies have existed there have always been people who have always transgressed the laws of their respective societies. It seems that whenever new laws are made, certain people find ways to break them. This book will introduce you to some of the most notorious figures, from all parts of the world, who have committed heinous crimes such as highway robbery, murder, and forgery. Beginning with Bulla Felix, the Roman highwayman, this book traces the careers of medieval outlaws such as Robin Hood and Adam Bell. Early modern murderers also make an appearance, such as Sawney Beane, whose story inspired the cult horror movie _The Hills Have Eyes_ (1977). Learn also about the crimes and daring escapes of Jack Sheppard, an eighteenth-century criminal who escaped from prison on several occasions, and find out if the 'gentlemanly' highwayman, Dick Turpin, was truly a gentleman. the ruffian Dick Turpin. This book also includes an appendix of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thieves' cant, as well as several historical poems, songs, and ballads relating to the subjects discussed, and the work is prefaced with an essay highlighting the significance of crime literature throughout history.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

A description of the friendship between the young Samuel Johnson and the poet, playwright and convicted murderer, Richard Savage. The book portrays the city of London as it was in the 18th-century. The author has also written "Shelley: The Pursuit" for which he won the Somerset Maugham Award.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction-- Imagining murder in Augustan England: bodies of evidence-- murder and gender-- Moving violations: Aphra Benn, Delarivier Manley, and the romance of violence-- 'Interesting memoirs of the most notorious characters': four 18th-century murderesses-- 'The confines of virtue and the frontiers of vice': Daniel Defoe's Roxana, and Henry Fielding's Amelia-- 'The prisoner at the bar': Mary Blandy and Henry Fielding-- Epilogue-- Works cited-- Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Arguing that the female criminal subject was central to the rise of the British novel, Kirsten T. Saxton provides fresh and convincing insights into the deeply complex ways in which categories of criminality, gender, and fiction intersected in the long eighteenth century. She offers the figure of the murderess as evidence of the constitutive relationship between eighteenth-century legal and fictional texts, comparing nonfiction representations of homicidal women in biographies of Newgate Ordinaries and in trial reports with those in the early novels of Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, Daniel Defoe, and Henry Fielding. As Saxton demonstrates that legal narratives informed the budding genre of the novel and fictional texts shaped the development of legal narratives, her study of deadly plots becomes a feminist intervention in scholarship on the literature of crime that simultaneously insists on the centrality of crime literature in feminist histories of the novel. Her epilogue shows that more than two centuries later, we still contend with displays of female violence that defy and define our notions of textual and sexual license and continue to shape literary and legal mandates, even as the lines between the real and the fictive remain blurred.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction-- Imagining murder in Augustan England: bodies of evidence-- murder and gender-- Moving violations: Aphra Benn, Delarivier Manley, and the romance of violence-- 'Interesting memoirs of the most notorious characters': four 18th-century murderesses-- 'The confines of virtue and the frontiers of vice': Daniel Defoe's Roxana, and Henry Fielding's Amelia-- 'The prisoner at the bar': Mary Blandy and Henry Fielding-- Epilogue-- Works cited-- Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Arguing that the female criminal subject was central to the rise of the British novel, Kirsten T. Saxton provides fresh and convincing insights into the deeply complex ways in which categories of criminality, gender, and fiction intersected in the long eighteenth century. She offers the figure of the murderess as evidence of the constitutive relationship between eighteenth-century legal and fictional texts, comparing nonfiction representations of homicidal women in biographies of Newgate Ordinaries and in trial reports with those in the early novels of Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, Daniel Defoe, and Henry Fielding. As Saxton demonstrates that legal narratives informed the budding genre of the novel and fictional texts shaped the development of legal narratives, her study of deadly plots becomes a feminist intervention in scholarship on the literature of crime that simultaneously insists on the centrality of crime literature in feminist histories of the novel. Her epilogue shows that more than two centuries later, we still contend with displays of female violence that defy and define our notions of textual and sexual license and continue to shape literary and legal mandates, even as the lines between the real and the fictive remain blurred.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

On 17th November 1989 Anna Blundy received a phonecall to say that her father, David Blundy, a foreign correspondant, had been shot reporting the war in El Salvador. In a way it was the phonecall she had been expecting all her life. Every time they said goodbye, she knew he might not return. Eight years later, in April 1997, Anna went to El Salvador to try to discover the truth about his death, and finally, after a decade of mourning, to come to terms with her loss. During her trip Anna, now a journalist herself, revisits her childhood and the world she and her father inhabited. Memories of the succession of lonely hotel bedrooms in exotic locations, the painful goodbyes, and the midnight phonecalls sometimes punctuated by the sound of gunfire. Every time she turned on the TV she imagined news of his death in some dusty foreign war. This is also an honest insight into the relationship between father and daughter - her fear of not fulfilling his expectations; of being supplanted by a new girlfriend or by the birth of a younger sister; of how her world collapsed the day when he died. This is a sharp but beautifully written account interweaving humour and bittersweet recollection.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)