"I never killed Raoul Loveday with a magical spell". Aleister Crowley, otherwise known as the Beast 666, shared membership of the Golden Dawn with W B Yeats, and publishers with D H Lawrence. Now in a beyond-the-grave autobiography, he recounts his own vocation, his practice of sex magic, and his bruising encounters with his contemporaries. The great magus, whose own world-conquering creed The Book of the Law was written in Cairo in 1904, was according to him, no murderer, but a prophet and practitioner of all kinds of sexual freedom and new magical systems.

Presents a provacative study of the diverse and complex characters of the the six wives of Henry VIII and their impact on the world

Drawing on a wealth of unpublished letters and documents and first-ever interviews with Celine's widow, Frederic Vitoux brilliantly weaves together all the available information on Celine into an extraordinary portrait of Celine's temptuous life and times. Photographs.

The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.' Sir Edward Grey, British foreign secretary, 3 August 1914. Drawing on a wealth of material from the Guardian archives 'When the lamps went out' presents a surprising, immediate, sometimes bleakly humorous, sometimes horrifying insight into life during the Great War. We see Boy Scouts patrolling the British coasts, David Lloyd George addressing women war workers, Charlie Chaplin impersonators on the Euston Road and Vesta Tilley at the Ardwick Empire. We see suffragist nurses on the Western Front and Bolsheviks in Glasgow, Pathan soldiers in Flanders and Anglo-Japanese armies in China. Small countries are saved - and aliens persecuted. New technologies - from picture houses to the first reports of gas weapons - are reported upon, as well as movie stars and John Buchan's bestsellers. The bloody battles, defeats, and victories are all here but this book focuses on the women, men and children who lived, loved, defied, perished and survived in the war to end all wars.

From marvellously illustrated pages leaps a rogues’ gallery of characters past and present who have, over the last 400 years, made this bohemian corner of London what it is.

Overzicht van leven en werk van de Franse chemicus en bacterioloog (1822-1895).

The first book to describe both Old Sheffield Plate and Electroplate along with their short lived predecessors mercury plating, cold gilding and close plating. It includes close up photographs of marks, purchasing advice, cleaning and caring.

The diary of the 17th Earl of Derby, once thought to have been lost, provides a detailed and important account of the last months of the First World War as seen through the eyes of the British Ambassador in Paris. Derby was in many ways an unlikely choice as ambassador. He was not a diplomat and could not, on his arrival, speak French. His appointment owed much to Lloyd George’s determination to remove him from his previous post as Secretary of State for War. But, after a somewhat uncertain start, he proved to be a very successful ambassador upon whom successive Foreign Secretaries, Arthur Balfour and Lord Curzon, relied heavily for their appreciation of the situation on the other side of the Channel. Derby took up his appointment at a crucial period of the war when military victory still seemed some way off. He became an assiduous collector of information which he dictated into his diary on a daily basis. Derby’s embassy became renowned for its lavish hospitality. But this was far from being self-indulgence, for he firmly believed that entertaining was the best way to win the confidence of his French associates and therefore to obtain information that would be of use in London. Derby’s diary provides important insights into the state of the war, the often strained relationship between Britain and France and the intrigues of French domestic politics.

Since its inception in World War II, the clinical trial has evolved into a standard procedure in determining therapeutic efficacy in many Western industrial democracies. Its features include a "control" group of patients that do not receive the experimental treatment, the random allocation of patients to either the experimental or control group, and the use of blind assessment so that the researchers do not know which patients are in either group. Even though it has been only within the past generation that the clinical trial has moved to the forefront of medical research, comparative statistics in a therapeutic context has a much longer history. From that history J. Rosser Matthews chooses to discuss three crucial debates: that among clinicians before the Parisian Academy of Medicine in 1837, the debate in the German physiological literature during the 1850s, and, in the early twentieth century, the debate over the bacteriologist's diagnostic technique involving the "opsonic index." Matthews demonstrates that despite the very real differences separating clinician, physiologist, and bacteriologist, they all shared an antipathy toward the methods of the statistician. Since they viewed medical judgment as a form of "tacit knowledge," they downplayed the concerns of the medical statistician who was attempting to make medical inference into something explicit and quantitative. Only when "medical decision-making" moved from the cloistered confines of professional medical expertise into the arena of open political debate could the medical statistician (and the clinical trial) gain the upper hand.