When Inspector Paws, a battle-scarred alley cat, narrowly escapes death by cougar, he moves in with Stella and Ernie Clayton, a couple in their late fifties. They provide him with good food, and their home, with its big backyard, caters to his roaming instincts. The best part, though, is that there are no kids around to torment him. But the cats newfound comfort is shattered when Ernie has a fatal heart attack. Ernies death is attributed to natural causes, but the tingle in Pawss whiskers convinces him otherwise. Ernie was always very careful with his heart pills, and Paws doesnt believe the line that Ernie knocked them over and couldnt get to them. Before he has a chance to figure out who killed Ernie and why, however, Stella and her zany friend Jo kidnap him and drag him off on a European bus tour, during which he becomes the tour mascot and self-appointed sleuth. Can he solve the mystery of who killed Ernie? And if he does, will he be able to communicate who it is to these sensory-challenged humans before the killer strikes again? A humorous and entertaining mystery, Inspector Paws and the Wonders of Europe introduces a new sleuth with just the right cattitude to solve the case.

Discusses how European scientists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonders, monsters, curiosities, marvels, and other phenomena to envision the natural world.

Book four in the Inspector Lestrade series. It is 1891 and London is still reeling from the horror of the unsolved Ripper murders when Inspector Lestrade (that ‘ferret-like’ anti-hero so often out-detected by the legendary Sherlock Holmes) is sent to the Isle of Wight to investigate a strange corpse found walled up in Shanklin Chine. But this is only the start of the nightmare. It is merely the beginning of a series of killings so brutal, so bizarre and, apparently, so random, that only a warped genius – and a master of disguise – could be responsible. Even when Lestrade pieces together the extraordinary pattern behind the crimes from the anonymous poems sent after each murder, he is no closer to knowing the identity of the sinister, self-styled ‘Agrippa’, the ‘great, long, red-legg’d scissor-man’. It becomes a very personal battle and Lestrade’s desperate race to avert the next death in the sequence takes him all over the country, from London to the Pennines and back, resulting in a portfolio of suspects which covers the entire range of late-Victorian society.

Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.

An unflinching and intelligent alternative history of the twentieth century that provides a provocative vision of Europe's past, present, and future. "[A] splendid book." —The New York Times Book Review Dark Continent provides an alternative history of the twentieth century, one in which the triumph of democracy was anything but a forgone conclusion and fascism and communism provided rival political solutions that battled and sometimes triumphed in an effort to determine the course the continent would take. Mark Mazower strips away myths that have comforted us since World War II, revealing Europe as an entity constantly engaged in a bloody project of self-invention. Here is a history not of inevitable victories and forward marches, but of narrow squeaks and unexpected twists, where townships boast a bronze of Mussolini on horseback one moment, only to melt it down and recast it as a pair of noble partisans the next.