A South African woman struggles to convince the police that she has murdered her black cook.

When Miss Hazelstone of Jacaranda Park kills her Zulu cook in a sensational crime passionel, the gallant members of the South African police force are soon on the scene: Kommandant van Heerden, whose secret longing for the heart of an English gentleman leads to the most memorable transplant operation yet recorded; Luitenant Verkramp of the Security Branch, ever active in the pursuit of Communist cells; Konstabel Els, with his propensity for shooting first and not thinking later - and also for forcing himself upon African women in a manner legally reserved for male members of their own race. In the course of the strange events which follow, we encounter some very esoteric perversions when the Kommandant is held captive in Miss Hazelstone's remarkable rubber room; and some even more amazing perversions of justice when Miss Hazelstone's brother, the Bishop of Barotseland, is sentenced to be hanged on the ancient gallows in the local prison. Not a 'political' novel in any previously imagined sense, Riotous Assembly provided a completely fresh approach to the South African scene - an approach startling in its deadpan savagery and yet also outrageously funny.

Sharpe's scintillating first novel, which established his name as the new master of comic fiction and paved the way to bestsellerdom, is a devastating look at the culture and society of South Africa, which he experienced at first hand. New cover reissue.

Riotous Assemblies examines eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England through the lens of popular disorder. Tackling both the more closely-studied forms of protest, such as food riots, industrial disorders, and political disturbances, and much less well understood occasions of popular disorder, such as tax riots, turnpike riots, riots against the establishment of the militia, and religious riot, Adrian Randall re-engages the study of riot within a wider interpretation of the forces - social, economic and political - which were transforming society. He pays particular attention to disturbances in the years between 1795 and 1812, critically examining how far they indicated the major discontinuities discerned by earlier histories of protest, or whether they retained much of the character of earlier upheaval. Based upon detailed case studies and drawing upon the most recent research, the book extends the focus of earlier studies of protest. It locates the origins of disorder within the concepts of constitutionalism and the free-born Englishman, and argues that older attitudes proved far more tenacious than many have allowed.

Why riot? Against whom? For what? Riotous Assemblies is an account of Irish riots, urban and rural, across Ireland from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century.

In Piemburgem, the deceptively peaceful-looking capital of Zululand, Kommandant van Heerden, Konstabel Els and Luitenant Verkramp continue to terrorise true Englishman and even truer Zulus in their relentless search for a perfect South Africa. Kommandant van Heerden, that great Anglophile, gropes his way towards attaining true 'Englishness' in the company of the eccentric Dornford Yates Club. But Luitenant Verkramp, whose hatred of all things English is surpassed only by his fear of sex, sets in motion an experiment in mass chastity (with the help of a lady psychiatrist), which has remarkable and quite unforeseen results.

______________________________ The 'endlessly funny' novel widely regarded as a classic of comic English literature Porterhouse College is world renowned for its gastronomic excellence, the arrogance of its Fellows, its academic mediocrity and the social cache it confers on the athletic sons of country families. Sir Godber Evans, ex-Cabinet Minister and the new Master, is determined to change all this. Spurred on by his politically angular wife, Lady Mary, he challenges the established order and provokes the wrath of the Dean, the Senior Tutor, the Bursar and, most intransigent of all, Skullion the Head Porter - with hilarious and catastrophic results.