Search

A dramatic intellectual biography of Victorian jurist Travers Twiss, who provided the legal justification for the creation of the brutal Congo Free StateEminent jurist, Oxford professor, advocate to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Travers Twiss (1809–1897) was a model establishment figure in Victorian Britain, and a close collaborator of Prince Metternich, the architect of the Concert of Europe. Yet Twiss's life was defined by two events that threatened to undermine the order that he had so stoutly defended: a notorious social scandal and the creation of the Congo Free State. In King Leopold's Ghostwriter, Andrew Fitzmaurice tells the incredible story of a man who, driven by personal events that transformed him from a reactionary to a reformer, rewrote and liberalised international law—yet did so in service of the most brutal regime of the colonial era.In an elaborate deception, Twiss and Pharaïlde van Lynseele, a Belgian prostitute, sought to reinvent her as a woman of suitably noble birth to be his wife. Their subterfuge collapsed when another former client publicly denounced van Lynseele. Disgraced, Twiss resigned his offices and the couple fled to Switzerland. But this failure set the stage for a second, successful act of re-creation. Twiss found new employment as the intellectual driving force of King Leopold of Belgium's efforts to have the Congo recognised as a new state under his personal authority. Drawing on extensive new archival research, King Leopold's Ghostwriter recounts Twiss's story as never before, including how his creation of a new legal personhood for the Congo was intimately related to the earlier invention of a new legal personhood for his wife.Combining gripping biography and penetrating intellectual history, King Leopold's Ghostwriter uncovers a dramatic, ambiguous life that has had lasting influence on international law.

The first full-scale biography of Robert Willis, the'founding father'of architectural history.WINNER of the Cambridge Association for Local History book award 2016 Robert Willis was the archetypal nineteenth-century polymath. Officially, as Jacksonian Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, he specialized in the study of mechanism, which he also taught at the Royal School of Mines in London. In the field of science he was an experimentalist, inventor and educational innovator. Meanwhile, in his spare time, he pursued his passion, pioneering the serious study of architectural history. Initially his work was aimed at architects - his role in providing an intellectual underpinning to the contemporary Gothic Revival was acknowledged by the award of the gold medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1862. However his main contribution was more historical. Starting with Canterbury, in 1844, over the course of his career, he investigated almost every English cathedral and developed an approach, combining documentary and archaeological research, which remains in use today. His studies culminated in the monumental Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, still the definitive account of its subject. In this fascinating and lavishly illustrated intellectual biography, drawn from extensive archival and architectural research, the author sheds new light on the interconnections between Willis's varied fields of interest and his fundamental role in the creation of a discipline. ALEXANDRINA BUCHANAN is both an architectural historian and an archivist; her introduction to archives came throughcataloguing the papers of Robert Willis at the Cambridge University Library. She is now Lecturer in Archive Studies at the University of Liverpool.

Goldwin Smith (1823-1910) was a celebrated, transatlantic writer on current events, politics, religion, history, and literature. While he made his academic mark teaching at Oxford, Cornell, and later as a resident guru at Toronto, his facile pen earned him a far greater reputation with general readers throughout the English-speaking world. Determined to rouse concern over issues that he deemed to be important to the advancement of humanity, Smith was deemed the controversialist by the Dictionary of National Biography. A study of his life and his writings provides new insight into liberalism, anti-semitism, the role of the journalist, and other aspects of life in late 19th century North America and Britain.As a public intellectual, Goldwin Smith spoke out on a variety of issues, frequently provoking intense debate. Phillips argues that the core of Smith's thought and the driving force behind his role as a controversialist lay in his moral philosophy, which provided a sense of direction to Smith's many and sometimes disparate writings and activities. This study will also probe the serious dilemma posed by Smith's path to agnosticism in the last decades of his life. By moving to a position of virtual unbelief, Smith risked damage not only to his carefully-crafted public persona, but also to a life's work as an impassioned moralist.

This volume contains two important works by Roger North (1651?—1734): his General Preface and Life of Dr John North. The General Preface is a remarkable discussion of the theory of life writing, in which North works towards a revolutionary new kind of biography that combines practical, ethical, and scientific uses. It is a plea for a personal biography that will entertain its readers, teach them valuable moral and practical lessons, and at the same time add to the store of data available on human nature. North is led to consider such matters as the use of subject's own works, the separation of the private life from the public, the unreliability of memory, and the unlikely combination of qualities needed in a biographer; he goes on to discuss the ethical responsibilities of the ‘historiographer'and meditates on the folly of devoting oneself to public service. The General Preface is a landmark in the history of biographical theory. It includes almost every point to be raised Johnson and Boswell several decades later, and introduces issues that were not to receive full critical attention until our own day.Following the General Preface is the Life of Dr John North, one of three biographies of North's brothers. The Life is beautifully focused on the neurotic Master of Trinity College, who lived for his Greek studies, kept spiders in glass jars, looked like a madame en travestie, and was at continual war with his students and Fellows. The biography contains fascinating glimpse of the Cambridge of Barrow and Newton in the period when Cartesian doctrines were still in the ascendant. It ends with a moving account of John North's collapse and final illness.Roger North's brilliant use of anecdotes to reveal personality and his unflinching recording of the facts both pleasant and unpleasant make the life of his difficult brother an excellent example of what he conceived biography to be: an entertaining source for lessons in living, and a document in the ‘natural history of mankind, which is everyone's interest to know.'