From its dim origins among Germanic speakers in the British Isles, the English tongue spread for over a millennium through commerce, cultural exchange, and military conquest to become the de facto language of our modern, globalized world. From the Shanghai stock exchange to the United Nations to Internet message boards, whenever people reach out to one another across culture and geography, they do so overwhelmingly in English. Yet the remarkable story of its rise to global dominance has been curiously neglected by historians.
Raised like a princess in one of the most powerful families in the American South, Henrietta Bingham was offered the helm of a publishing empire. Instead, she ripped through the Jazz Age like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character. In New York, Louisville, and London, she drove both men and women wild with desire, and her youth blazed with sex. But her love affairs with women made her the subject of derision, and she suffered from years of addiction and breakdowns. Perhaps most painfully, she became a source of embarrassment for her family. But forebears can become fairy-tale figures, especially when they defy tradition and are spoken of only in whispers.
This memoir was recently discovered and appears to have been written in the 1920s by someone who asserts that he was Jack the Ripper. This person is James Willoughby Carnac, and this memoir was written shortly before his death. It is an account of his entire life, including a few short months in 1888 when he became the murderer known to posterity as Jack the Ripper. This book introduces a new suspect for the infamous murders in Whitechapel in 1888.
When first published in 1932, this memoir was an immediate classic, both as a unique eyewitness account of Revolutionary Russia and as one man's story of struggle, and tragedy set against the background of great events.;Aged 25, Lockhart became the British Vice-Consul to Moscow in 1912. With revolution in the air, it was dangerous, decadent posting.
