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London : for A. Bell; J. Pemberton, and J. Brown, 1715. First edition. Trials ancient and modern, including trials by ordeal, combat and attainder, as well as by the laws of church and state. A chronological selection, commencing with the trial by fire of Queen Emma before the Conquest, and continuing with similar highlights, some treated at very full length, including the trial of Cecely de Rygeway for the murder of her husband in 1347; the trial by combat of Henry Plantagenet (Henry IV) and Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, in 1397; the trial of Richard, Earl of Cambridge, for treason against Henry V; the trials of Sir John Oldcastle both for heresy and for treason in 1413 and 1417 respectively; the trial of Anne Boleyn; the treason rial of Thomas Cromwell; the attainder of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and the treason trial of his son, the Earl of Surrey, in 1547; the trial of Alice Arden of Faversham in 1551; the treason trial of Sir Nicholas Throgmorton in 1554, and the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1586, as well as a number of less well known cases. A further selection was published the following year.
Crown 8vo (191 x 119mm). [x],452,[iv]pp. Bound in a later full polished panelled calf, banded and richly gilt; some light rubbing and wear; slight cracking at head; some very light worming to lower blank margins throughout; some very occasional mild internal spotting, but an elegant copy still. With the nineteenth-century bookplate of Baron Kinnaird of Inchture.

SOLD

New York : Century Co., 1915. First edition. A handsomely illustrated history of the French Revolution, in six parts, differing in tone from Belloc’s earlier and more formal history published in 1911. The present version was never published in the UK.
Demy 8vo (225 x 150mm). [vi],(302)pp. Colour frontispiece. Plates. Portraits. Bound in a handsome contemporary half red morocco, banded and gilt; top edge gilt; marbled sides and endpapers; a few minor signs of age and use; occasional mild spotting and browning, but overall a very good copy. With the pictorial bookplate of the collector Roy McWilliams.

£125

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London : Richard Bentley, 1835. First edition. The first full-scale biography of the “Man of Mercury” – Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751) – politician, exile, writer, historian, philosopher, libertine and wit – a figure, in the author’s phrase, too long “sedulously erased” from the history books. Included as appendices are Bolingbroke’s poems, the articles of impeachment, his will, etc.
Two volumes. Demy 8vo. xx,416; viii,472pp. Portrait frontispiece to each volume. Bound in a later (early twentieth century) half crimson calf, banded and gilt, by Bayntun; top edges gilt; marbled endpapers; some minor wear and rubbing; spines a little dulled; some sunning to lower covers; preface and contents leaves to vol. i misbound in vol. ii; text a little marked and fingered in places; one leaf slightly damaged, without loss of text; but overall a good set. With the bookplate of William John Robertson in each volume.

£100

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London : Constable & Co., (1936). First British edition. One of the most admired, brilliant and beautifully written historical studies of the twentieth-century – Dangerfield locates the ominous conjunction of forces which overwhelmed the Liberal Party – the Lords, the Fenians, the radical workers, and the suffragettes.
Demy 8vo (222 x 135mm). (x),420pp. Bound in a handsome recent half burgundy morocco, banded and gilt; top edge red; a handful of spots to the first couple pf leaves, but otherwise a very good, clean and sound copy.

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London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, (1971). First British edition. “Jammed into the hundred-acre plaza of the Gate of Heavenly Peace one August morning in 1966 were over a million young Chinese. Their bright crimson armbands proclaimed them the Red Guard. They were waiting to see their leader, Mao Tse-tung, ‘the red, red sun in our hearts’, waiting for the words that would send them streaming out over China in an outbreak of destruction and terror stimulated by idealism, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”. A detailed and penetrating history from the multiple award-winning Anglo-American author and journalist, head of the Hong Kong Bureau of the Los Angeles Times in the years that mattered, as well as advisor to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
Demy 8vo (23cm). xiv,478,[iv]pp. Original red boards, ruled and lettered in gilt; top edge pink; a touch bruised; some spotting of edges, but otherwise very good in the Keith Davis / Graham Berney dust-jacket — the jacket a touch dusty, lightly edge-worn, with a short tear to the upper panel, but complete and attractive still.

£40

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London : Williams & Norgate, 1927. First edition. “To obey God’s orders as delivered by conscience – that is duty; to obey man’s orders as issued by rightful authority – that is discipline. The foundation of both alike is denial of self for a higher good” . Inspirational examples of both addressed to “the youth of England” from the lesser-known annals of army history – St. Lucia 1778; Robert Rollo Gillespie; Sir Harry Burrard and Sir John Moore; Sir Harry Smith; the Burmese Expedition 1824-1826; Lord Raglan, and several more.
Crown 8vo (177 x 115mm). (xviii),284pp. Four portrait plates. Folding map. Bound for the Terra Nova School of Birkdale in a fine contemporary full tree calf prize binding, banded and richly gilt; red label; marbled endpapers and edges; a few trifling signs of age, but a very good copy. Presentation label dated July 1928 on front pastedown made out to J. V. Hansford – John Vernon Hansford (1915-1999).

£125

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London : Longmans, Green & Co., 1901. The Silver Library edition of Froude’s celebrated lectures on Hawkins, Drake and the Armada, originally published in 1895 – and here presented in a handsome prize binding. “Let us be thankful that the Reformation period has been once more illuminated by a man who to original research and immense labour, which are none too common, added a brilliance of style and vividness of narration – a combination which is most rare” (Westminster Gazette, 22nd April 1895).
Crown 8vo (183 x 121mm). [vi],(310)pp. Bound in a contemporary peacock-blue half calf, banded and gilt, by Andrews of Durham, with the crest of the Durham Training College for School Masters on the upper cover; red label; all edges red; marbled endpapers; a few very faint signs of age, but an excellent copy. An inscription notes the book’s award as a prize to J. R. Moses, second in the college list in 1902 – this John Robert Moses (1880-1917), the son of a local miner and who later became a schoolmaster in Sunderland. For a full account, see my Bookhunter on Safari blog-post for 4th September 2014.

£125

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London : Macmillan & Co., 1902-1903. The magnificent “illustrated edition” of Green’s magisterial and hugely popular account, first published in 1874. Short only by Victorian standards, “It is a history, not of English Kings or English Conquests, but of the English People”. Green was among the first to switch attention from political and military to social and cultural history, although remaining well aware of that “recurring tendency to the formation of oppressive oligarchic structures from which, periodically, ordinary Englishmen had to liberate themselves” (Anthony Brundage in ODNB). The illustrated edition was prepared after his death by Green’s wife, Alice Stopford Green, and his former assistant, Kate Norgate – “It was a favourite wish of my husband’s to see English History interpreted and illustrated by pictures which should tell us how men and things appeared to lookers-on in their own day, and how contemporary observers aimed at representing them”.
Four volumes. Crown 4to (250 x 165mm). lvi,468; [6],lvi-lxxxiv,(469-932); [6],lxxxiii-(cxii),(933)-(1410); [6],(cxi)-(cxxxvi),(1411)-1906pp. Plates and maps (some folding, some coloured), portraits, tables, facsimiles, illustrations in text. Also bound in at the start is the shorter introductory matter to the earlier 1892 edition. Bound in a handsome contemporary half green morocco, banded and gilt; top edges gilt; just lightly sunned; a few minor marks and spots; a couple of leaves lightly discoloured, but a very good set.

SOLD

London : Gerald Duckworth & Co., (1997). First edition. The story of the sensational libel trial brought against the famous dancer Maud Allan (1873-1956) in 1918, a case which threatened to bring down the British establishment. “This is a story of judges and prejudice, of aesthetes and admirals, of MPs and dancing girls, of sex and conspiracy”.
Medium 8vo (25cm). vi,250pp. Plates. Portraits. Original red boards, lettered in gilt; a very good copy in a just lightly used dust-jacket.

£25

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London : Richard Bentley, 1843 [but 1842]. First edition. “It gives us the home, private and personal memoirs of royalty from William III and his Queen Mary to George II; and lets us into the stories of their courtly circles, and their recreations when released from the miseries of ceremony and etiquette ... having once begun with them, it will be found a difficult matter to lay them down until the word finis stares the untired reader in the face ... altogether one of the most entertaining works with which our lighter literature has ever been adorned” (The Globe, 7th January 1843). With individual chapters on the monarchs, consorts, mistresses, children, and other notables, including the Dukes of Marlborough and Buckingham, Viscount Bolingbroke, Francis Atterbury, Abigail Masham, Robert Harley, Beau Fielding, the Earl of Chesterfield, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Mary Bellenden, Sir Robert Walpole, George Bubb Doddington, etc.
Three volumes. Demy 8vo (217 x 131mm). xx,496; xx,(442); (xviii),460pp. Engraved portrait frontispieces. Bound, without the half-title to vol.iii, in a handsome later half red calf, banded and gilt; black title-labels; marbled boards, endpapers and edges; some minor rubbing and slight scuffing, but a very good, clean and sound set. With the armorial bookplate in each volume of Laurence Currie (1867-1934), banker, director of railway and insurance companies, member of the Council of India and of the Royal Commission on University Education in London, and author of a book on Napoleon and his marshals.

£200

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ondon : Cassell & Co., (1943). Second impression of the original December 1943 publication – a pleasing presentation copy, inscribed to the historian Sir Arthur Bryant (1899-1985), “With best wishes and my thanks”, signed and dated Christmas 1943 by Collie Knox. Bryant was one of the numerous contributors to this wide-ranging wartime anthology of uplifting and inspiring quotations on the nature of England and the English, and has made a pencilled correction to his piece headed “Tradition is in Our Bones”. Elsewhere Bryant has placed pencil marks against other passages. There are familiar extracts from Blake, Brooke, Browning, Churchill, Kipling, Masefield, Milton, Shakespeare, Swinburne, Tennyson, Wordsworth, but a far greater number of lesser-known, more contemporary, and specially commissioned pieces from a variety of voices, including Knox himself and his flatmate, the refugee German actor Olaf Olsen (1919-2000) – “Of a truth, you are a strange, puzzling people. You laugh when you should cry. And when you should cry, you blow your noses very loudly and go for long walks”.
Demy 8vo (22cm). 244pp. Original red cloth, ruled and lettered in black; a little sunned; slightly worn at tips; small spine crease; two corners bumped; a few marks; front endpaper cracked; a few internal creases, but a serviceable copy with a handsome provenance.

£50

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London : Bloomsbury Publishing, (1988). First edition. Inscribed to Brian and Elspet [the actor Brian Rix and his wife Elspet Gray] and signed “John and Robert” by the authors – “Your support and love have been so invaluable”. The horrendously wounded hero of Mount Tumbledown and his father give a personal and controversial account, with the editorial assistance of Carol Price.
Royal 8vo (25cm). xii,196pp. Plates. Original red boards, lettered in gilt; a very good copy in the dust-jacket – lightly sunned, but also very good.

£40

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London : Longmans, Green & Co., 1902. An attractively bound reprint of the celebrated historian’s popular discussion of everyday ethical problems. It was in 1902 that Lecky became one of the first people to be granted the new Order of Merit. Originally published in 1899.
Foolscap 8vo (17cm). xiv;(354)pp. Bound in an elaborate full green morocco, banded and extra gilt, by George Frederick Ayling (1862-1928) of Brighton and London; all edges gilt; a little rubbed and tanned, with a slight split at head, but still an attractive book.

SOLD

London : Ivor Nicholson & Watson, [1932]. First edition. Essays by various well-chosen hands on forty Victorians – including Edmund Blunden on Matthew Arnold, Rebecca West on Charlotte Bronte, G. K. Chesterton on Charles Dickens, Neville Cardus on W. G. Grace, Laurence Housman on Florence Nightingale, Hugh Walpole on Anthony Trollope, etc.
Demy 8vo (23cm). xx,556pp. Original orange cloth; just a touch sunned and faintly bruised; a few slight marks, but othrwise a very good copy. Ex-libris label inscribed J. Hornby and dated 1932.

£20

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London : Gerald Duckworth & Co. / British Broadcasting Corporation, (1985). First edition. The rediscovered texts of George Orwell’s wartime radio broadcasts, transmitted weekly from December 1941 (Pearl Harbor) through to February 1943. Passages originally deleted by the wartime censor have been restored where legible. “The first large-scale unpublished work of Orwell’s to appear since his early death in 1950”. Edited, introduced and extensively annotated by the late W. J. (Bill) West (1942-1999), who discovered the lost original manuscripts.
Medium 8vo (25cm). 248pp. Maps. Original boards; price obliterated from front free endpaper, but a very good copy in the dust-jacket – the jacket just lightly sunned but with negligible wear. Contemporary gift inscription.

£25

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London : Parker Gallery, 1911. First edition : a variant with the Parker Gallery label pasted over the original T. H. Parker imprint. A catalogue of the collection of 287 prints, with extensive descriptive and historical notes, an index of artists and engravers, a general index, etc. – the whole forming an illuminating history of the British navy. With an interesting introduction by the naval historian, Commander Charles Napier Robinson (1849-1936).
Foolscap 4to (22cm). xx,(340)pp. Frontispiece and eighteen plates. Original blue cloth, ruled in blind and lettered in gilt; just a touch rubbed; a few faint marks and some mild occasional spotting, but a bright and sound copy.

£40

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London : for T. Cooper, 1742. First edition. An impressive and spirited riposte to the recently published memoirs of Sarah Churchill, Dowager Duchess of Marlborough (1660-1744), throwing much light on the history of the court from the revolution to 1710. Ralph, of whom his erstwhile friend Benjamin Franklin wrote “I think I never knew a prettier talker”, arrived in England with Franklin in 1724. As a journalist and historian he soon became enmeshed in English literary and political circles and their long-running feuds. He was a friend at various times of both Fielding and Hogarth and it was Charles James Fox who said of him, “I am every day more and more surprised that Ralph should have had so much less reputation as an historian than he seems to deserve”.
Post 8vo (194 x 121mm). [iv],(468)pp. Bound in a neat recent half calf, banded and tooled in blind; title-page a touch dusty and slightly chipped; some occasional spotting; a few minor marks and small flaws; very faint discolouration of the upper margin of some leaves, but still a very good copy.

£200

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London : Evans Brothers, (1980). First edition. The extraordinary tale of the British volunteers and mercenaries who helped gain independence for the countries of South America – “the swashbuckling and fearless Lord Cochrane; William Brown, the amateur admiral; the embattled William Miller of Peru”, etc.
Demy 8vo (23cm). (176)pp. Plates. Portraits. Maps. Original boards; very good in a price-clipped but very lightly used and just slightly sunned dust-jacket.

£25

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New York : Random House, (1971). First edition. A raging satire on Richard Nixon, still President in 1971, and the debasement of political language to the Orwellian formula — “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. Dwight Macdonald in the New York Times called it “far-fetched, unfair, tasteless, disturbing, logical, coarse and very funny ... in short, a masterpiece”.
Demy 8vo (22cm). [xiv],200,[ii],[2],[vi]pp. Original quarter black cloth, blue boards, blocked and lettered in red, silver and gilt; top edge red; just a hint of bruising; a touch of adhesion damage to the front endpaper, but a very good, bright, clean and sound copy in the dust-jacket — price-clipped, but very good, fresh, bright and unworn.

£40

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London : Macmillan & Co., 1951. First edition. “Now that the great days of England are perhaps over – it is extraordinary to think that we have lived through the very greatest of them in our lifetime – it is somehow consoling to pursue and evoke the past, recent as well as remote”. Twelve essays – on All Souls; on Hillesden and Oliver Cromwell; on Milton; on Jonathan Swift; an afternoon at Haworth Parsonage; on Thomas Hardy and Max Gate; on John Buchan; on Nottingham – “what an astonishing town it is”; on D. H. Lawrence, and on Alun Lewis, etc.
Demy 8vo (214 x 131mm). (x),(246)pp. Bound in a handsome contemporary full Turkish blue morocco, banded and gilt; silk headbands; all edges gilt; Cockerell endpapers; a little sunned, but otherwise a very good copy.

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London : Macmillan & Co., 1962. First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed to fellow historian Arthur Bryant and his wife – “For Arthur and Anne – admiration – affection – encouragement from A.L.” Rowse’s ground-breaking interpretation of Sir Walter Raleigh or Ralegh – “the most brilliant, various and glittering of all Elizabethans”, relying on the recently discovered Throckmorton diaries.
Demy 8vo (23cm). (xii),(348)pp. Plates. Portraits. Original cloth gilt; a touch dulled and slightly marked; some internal marks; four leaves loose at rear; a well-read copy in a worn, creased and slightly marked dust-jacket. With numerous pencilled annotations and underlinings by Arthur Bryant.

SOLD

London : for Robert Pawlet, 1678. First edition. The transcript of the trial for high treason of the goldsmith and banker William Staley – the first victim of the fevered Popish Plot trials. A conversation in French overheard in a public house led to the charge that Staley did “falsly, wickedly, and traiterously compass, imagine, devise and invent the killing the King”. He was reported as saying, inter alia, “the King of England is the greatest heretick and the greatest rogue in the world, there’s the heart... and here’s the hand that would kill him”. In the atmosphere of the time, he was summarily found guilty and sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered.
Pott folio (31cm). 12pp. Disbound. Slightly soiled and lightly frayed; a few minor nicks and creases, but a good and serviceable copy.

£100

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London : John Murray, (1966). First edition. “This is the history of the long frontier of the Euphrates through eight centuries of Roman warfare”. A panoramic survey of the power-sapping travails of Rome on the eastern outskirts of empire – the Seleucid kings, the Parthians, the Armenian wars, etc. – and a message of “the uselessness of war across a frontier whose trade was able to benefit both sides”.
Medium 8vo (23cm). (xii),(460)pp. Plates. Double-page map. Folding map at rear. Bibliography, etc. Original canvas, lettered in gilt; just a touch sunned; a few ninor marks and spots, but a very good copy in the dust-jacket – the jacket price-clipped by the publisher with a revised price over-sticker, and with some very minor marking and wear, but also very good.

£40

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London : Macmillan & Co., 1893. First edition. An interesting and erudite discourse from the British parliamentarian and scholar on the variety of ways of knowing and understanding the great figures of the past – via history, biography, autobiography, diaries, memoirs, letters, table-talk, characterisation, monumental inscriptions, portraiture and, not least, imaginative literature. With passing reference to Aristotle, Boswell, Julius Caesar, Lord Chesterfield, Goethe, Dr Johnson, La Bruyère, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Theophrastus, Voltaire, etc., etc. The present extra-illustrated copy has been enlivened by the insertion of thirty-seven engraved portraits, culled from various sources, of a number of the figures mentioned (although the hand-coloured plate inserted as a frontispiece would appear to be a portrait of Robert Stevenson, the engineer, rather than of the author).
Crown 8vo (191 x 125mm). (viii),140pp. Thirty-seven engraved or lithographed portraits inserted. Bound in a handsome near contemporary half blue crushed morocco, banded and gilt, by Blackwell – I think Henry Blackwell (1851-1928) of New York, rather than the Oxford booksellers; top edge gilt; marbled sides and matching endpapers; a hint of rubbing and a few very minor signs of age; a sprinkling of internal spots, but a very good copy.

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London : John Murray, 1917. First edition. An engaging and well-researched life of one Lord Mayor of London – the turbulent and magnificent John Wilkes (1725-1797) – by one of his successors in that office. Duels, the “North Briton”, general warrants, habeas corpus, expulsions from the Commons, the Middlesex elections, the mayoralty and all the rest.
Demy 8vo (23cm). xxxvi,(300)pp. Sixteen plates. Original armorial cloth gilt; some minor wear; a touch dulled; some internal browning and spotting, but a good and sound copy. A 1918 gift inscription is signed by the author’s wife.

£25

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London : Macmillan & Co., 1908. A collection of fifty historical tales of heroism and self-denial intended as “a treasury for young people”, or “a mother’s storehouse for reading aloud to her boys” – Alcestis and Antigone, The Pass of Thermopylae, The Shepherd Girl of Nanterre, The Keys of Calais, Sir Thomas More’s Daughter, The Children in the Wood of the Far South, etc. Originally published in 1864.
Foolscap 8vo (154 x 98mm). (xii),454pp. Engraved pictorial title-page. Bound in a very pretty contemporary half navy calf, banded and gilt; red label; top edge gilt; a few trifling signs of age, but a very good, clean and partially unopened copy. With the attractive 1914 bookplate of Maude Hawke (1888-1976), etched by her Tyneside neighbour, Sir Henry John Fanshawe Badeley (1874-1951), and the later 1950 ownership inscription of David Fyfe Anderson.

£50

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