Poor Freddie Doolan! He still lives with his folks despite having graduated in film studies from a prestigious university. The great Director, Cephas Varte gives a lecture which Freddie attends. Afterwards, Freddie meets the Director who takes a liking to him and offers him a job on set, albeit a menial one. Freddie becomes entranced with Cephas and patterns himself after the Director both mentally and physically, buying elevator shoes, changing his hair shape and color, for example. The Director is flattered and brings Freddie along to Germany where he is shooting a new film. Freddie meets Lacey, a beautiful women and former drug addict, now Cephas’s wife. Suspicious of Freddie, she guards the Director day and night. The film proceeds badly. Several disasters happen during the shoot. One day, Lacey accidentally runs over and kills a girl while driving in the countryside. She does not stop. In the cover-up, she sends Freddie with the vehicle to Frankfurt to have the front end repaired. There, an American named Billy, aware of the accident, tries to blackmail Cephas and Lacey. They devise a successful, if horrendous, plan to get rid of this nuisance. Out of guilt, Cephas lapses back into drugs. Now finding the situation unbearable, Freddie attempts to disengage from Cephas and Lacey. Can he do so? Can Cephas and Lacey escape jail?

The Lost King' tells the story of Louis XVII – the French royal who allegedly died at the age of ten but, as legend has it, escaped to foreign lands where he lived to an old age. Sabatini breathes life into these age-old myths, creating a story of passion, revenge and betrayal.

"The last great work of the age of reason, the final instance when all human knowledge could be presented with a single point of view ... Unabashed optimism, and unabashed racism, pervades many entries in the 11th, and provide its defining characteristics ... Despite its occasional ugliness, the reputation of the 11th persists today because of the staggering depth of knowledge contained with its volumes. It is especially strong in its biographical entries. These delve deeply into the history of men and women prominent in their eras who have since been largely forgotten - except by the historians, scholars"-- The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2012/apr/10/encyclopedia-britannica-11th-edition.

This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.