Great Speeches of the 20th Century

Sara Lodge (Author)

The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective

6,A revelatory history of the women who brought Victorian criminals to account--and how they became a cultural sensationShortlisted for The Wolfson History Prize 2025 From Wilkie Collins to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the traditional image of the Victorian detective is male. Few people realise that women detectives successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves. Sara Lodge recovers these forgotten women's lives. She also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction, enthralling a public who relished the spectacle of a cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroine who got the better of love rats, burglars, and murderers alike. How did the morally ambiguous work of real women detectives, sometimes paid to betray their fellow women, compare with the exploits of their fictional counterparts, who always save the day? Lodge's book takes us into the murky underworld of Victorian society on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the female detective as both an unacknowledged labourer and a feminist icon. ...

Guy De La Bedoyere (Author)

The Fall of Egypt and the Rise of Rome: A History of the Ptolemies

2, A compelling history of the Ptolemies, the decline of Egypt, and the rising power of the Roman Empire The Ptolemaic era, Egypt's last and one of its longest dynasties, was in many ways a gilded age. Its early rulers restored and even expanded Egyptian power. Over a span of 300 years the period was witness to intellectual enlightenment, imaginative state-building, and some of the most memorable characters in ancient history, including Alexander the Great and Cleopatra VII. But these Macedonian Greek pharaohs embarked on ruinous warfare, faced rebellion, and descended into murderous family feuds. Increasingly reliant on the dizzying rise of Roman power, Ptolemaic Egypt was finally annexed by Augustus in 30 BCE. How did such an ancient civilization come to this? Exploring the lives of the Ptolemaic pharaohs, de la B?doy?re reveals the jealousy, greed, and murderous ambition in their Egypt and the legendary city of Alexandria, their capital. This is a lively, accessible account of Ancient Egypt's last days--and of the new power rising in its place.

Thomas Albert Howard (Author)

Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History

9,A sweeping history of the violence perpetrated by governments committed to extreme forms of secularism in the twentieth century A popular truism derived from the Enlightenment holds that violence is somehow inherent to religion, to which political secularism offers a liberating solution. But this assumption ignores a glaring modern reality: that putatively progressive regimes committed to secularism have possessed just as much and often a vastly greater capacity for violence as those tied to a religious identity. In Broken Altars, Thomas Albert Howard presents a powerful account of the misery, deaths, and destruction visited on religious communities by secularist regimes in the twentieth century. Presenting three principal forms of modern secularism that have arisen since the Enlightenment--passive secularism, combative secularism, and eliminationist secularism--Howard argues that the latter two have been especially violence-prone. Westerners do not fully grasp this, however, because they often mistake the first form, passive secularism, for secularism as a whole. But a disconcertingly more complicated picture emerges with the adoption of a broader global vision. Admitting ...