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This is not a book on how to write historical fiction. It is a book on how not to write historical fiction.

If you love history and you're hard at work writing your first historical novel, but you're wondering if your medieval Irishmen would live on potatoes, if your 17th-century pirate would use a revolver, or if your hero would be able to offer Marie-Antoinette a box of chocolate bonbons . . . (The answer to all these is "Absolutely not ") . . . then Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders is the book for you.

Medieval Underpants will guide you...

*This book was previously released under the title "A Tale of Two Cities: A Reader's Companion."*

You've read "A Tale of Two Cities"-perhaps more than once. But what are gaols, bumpers, tocsins, farmer-generals, and the Court of King's Bench? Where are Shooter's Hill, Temple Bar, and La Force, and who on earth was Mrs. Southcott? And did all those starving French people have baguettes in mind when they wanted bread?

"The Annotated A Tale of Two Cities" is not a literary analysis of Dickens's novel, but a source of information for the new reader, the longterm fan, and the student,...

For police investigator Aristide Ravel, the teeming streets of dissolute postrevolutionary Paris are a constant source of activity. And in the unruly climate of 1797, when gold and food are scarce, citizens will stop at little to get what they need.

When illiterate servant Jeannette Moineau is accused of poisoning her master, Ravel cannot believe she is guilty. With stubborn witnesses, a mysterious white powder, and stolen goods all stacked against her, however, he knows it will not be easy to clear her of the charges. But he finds an unexpected ally in Laurence, a young widow of the...

The French Revolution is vividly brought to life in a brilliant retelling of the classic story that has captured the imagination of readers since the 1850s.

In Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities," Sydney Carton is an almost ancillary character. Dickens' novel tells us the stories of Charles Darnay, Lucie Manette, and Alexandre Manette. Carton disappears from the novel for eleven chapters and several years, reappearing without warning to bring the novel to its chilling and heartbreaking end. Yet Dickens is silent about the circumstances that transformed Carton from a promising youth to...

Welcome to the weirder (and darker) side of the City of Light.

You've probably visited-or plan to visit-the Paris Catacombs. But for history buffs, travelers trying to escape the overcrowded "must-sees," and fans of the bizarre, macabre, or morbid, there's a lot more than the Catacombs to explore in the offbeat, often creepy side of the city that most tourists never see.

Forget all the cliches about romance-the most romantic sight you're likely to find in this oddball, grim, or gory Paris will be a tombstone. In these pages you'll discover the city's stranger secrets and grislier...

Louis XVI is in his grave, and Marie-Antoinette is on her way to trial. Paris is hungry, restless, and fearful in the autumn of 1793, and the guillotine's blade is beginning to fall daily on the necks of enemies of the French Republic. Not even members of the republican government are safe from the threat of the Revolutionary Tribunal, where the only sentence for the guilty is death.

In this atmosphere of distrust and anxiety, police agent Aristide Ravel, while coming to terms with personal tragedy, must stop a ruthless killer who is terrorizing the city. Ravel soon learns, however, that...

In "Bygone London Life," antiquary and social historian G.L. Apperson gives us glimpses of a day-to-day London that was already long gone when his book was first published in 1903-the raucous, vibrant city of Elizabethan eating-houses, literary taverns, private museums, mincing Restoration fops, and rowdy Georgian rakes. Here are types and institutions from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries: poets and sedan-chair operators; coffee-house wits and night watchmen; "pretty fellows" and shoeblacks; kickshaws, macaronies, ordinaries, bucks and bloods, and cabinets of...

Paris, 1796. Aristide Ravel, freelance undercover police agent and investigator, is confronted with a double murder in a fashionable apartment. The victims are Celie Montereau, the daughter of a wealthy and influential family, and the man who was blackmailing her. Rosalie Clement, an enigmatic, bitter young woman, provides information that steers Ravel toward a young man with a violent past who was in love with Celie, but further inquiry reveals that-according to an eyewitness-he cannot have been her murderer. And recent, notorious miscarriages of justice lead Ravel, beset with fears of...

Charles-Henri Sanson has good looks, a fine education, and plenty of money: everything, in fact, that a stylish young Parisian could ask for. He also has an infamous family name-and he's trapped in a hideous job that no one wants.

The last thing Charles ever wanted to be was a hangman. But he's the eldest son of Paris's most dreaded public official, and in the 1750s, after centuries of superstition, people like him are outcasts. He knows that the executioner's son must become an executioner himself or starve, for all doors are closed to him; although he loathes the role and would much...

In the icy winter of 1786, in the final years before the French Revolution, hunger, cold, and seething frustration with the iron grip of France's absolute monarchy drive poor and rich alike to outright defiance. Slums, fashionable cafes, and even aristocratic mansions echo with discontent and the first warning signals of the approaching turmoil of 1789.

Paris's cemeteries are foul and disease-ridden, but no one, including penniless writer Aristide Ravel, expects to find a man with his throat cut lying dead in a churchyard, surrounded by strange Masonic symbols. Already suspected of...

In April, 1793, the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris condemned a handful of prisoners to death for crimes against the French Republic-and judges, jury, and spectators wept as sentence was passed.

In July, 1794, the Tribunal sent thirty to fifty people a day to the guillotine.

What, in fifteen months, turned the Tribunal into an instrument of mass murder? What collective madness or terror seized its personnel, some of them callous psychopaths, others decent men trapped in nightmarish circumstances? How could they casually condemn hundreds to death, from peasants to duchesses, from...

In fascinating detail, France in the Eighteenth Century focuses on modern history's most extravagant kingdom and century-France before the Revolution, 1700 to 1789. Lavishly illustrated, it re-creates the splendor and squalor of a fateful era, from the court at Versailles to the filthy back streets of Paris, from royal etiquette to the raucous cries of street peddlers.

How the French, rich and poor, dressed, what they ate, how they educated their children, wore their hair, traveled, amused themselves, punished their malefactors-all this and much more comes under the probing eye of...