M. C. Beaton meets Miss Marple in the second book in the Laetitia Rodd Mysteries, which sees Kate Saunders's Victorian detective on the hunt for a missing Oxford academic. In 1851, private detective Laetitia Rodd is enjoying a well-earned holiday when she gets an urgent request for her services. Mrs. Rodd's neighbor Jacob Welland is a reclusive, rich gentleman dying of consumption, and he wants Mrs. Rodd to find his brother, who has been missing for fifteen years. Joshua Welland was a scholar at Oxford, brilliant, eccentric, and desperately poor when he disappeared from the university. Friends claim to have seen him since, in gypsy camps and wandering around the countryside. But the last sighting was ten years before-when Joshua claimed to be learning great secrets from the gypsies that would one day astound the whole world. Mrs. Rodd travels to Oxford and begins to search for the wandering scholar. But as she investigates, Mrs. Rodd discovers something dark-and extremely dangerous-lurking in the beautiful English countryside. For readers of James Runcie, Alexander McCall Smith, and M. C. Beaton, Laetitia Rodd and the Mystery of the Wandering Scholar is a delightful new mystery about Victorian England and an indomitable female detective.

This book is a real-life documentary of two of these challenges, and their eventual successful outcomes and their discoveries; but more than that it is an adventure story in ideas, and the surprising synchronicity that is the Daily Lot of the postmodernist wandering scholar. Read-on and enjoy the journey.

The Weimar era in Germany is often characterized as a time of significant change. Such periods of rupture transform the way people envision the past, present, and future. This book traces the conceptions of time and history in the Germany of the early 20th century. By focusing on both the discourse and practices of the youth movement, the author shows how it reinterpreted and revived the past to overthrow the premises of modern historical thought. In so doing, this book provides insight into the social implications of the ideological de-historicization of the past.

'Laetitia Rodd is a warm and engaging heroine' The Times For readers of The Thursday Murder Club, M.C. Beaton and James Runcie, The Mystery of the Sorrowful Maiden is the charming third mystery in Kate Saunders's series about Laetitia Rodd, the indomitable Victorian lady detective. In the spring of 1853, private detective Laetitia Rodd receives a delicate request from a retired actor, whose days on the stage were ended by a theatre fire ten years before. His great friend, and the man he rescued from the fire, Thomas Transome, has decided to leave his wife, who now needs assistance in securing a worthy settlement. Though Mrs Rodd is reluctant to get involved with the scandalous world of the theatre, she cannot turn away the woman in need. She agrees to take the case. But what starts out as a simple matter of negotiation becomes complicated when a body is discovered in the burnt husk of the old theatre. Soon Mrs Rodd finds herself embroiled in family politics, rivalries that put the Capulets and Montagues to shame, and betrayals on a Shakespearean scale. Mrs Rodd will need all her investigative powers, not to mention her famous discretion, to solve the case before tragedy strikes once more. Praise for the Laetitia Rodd Mystery series: 'A witty, genteel tale of secrets, lies and hidden gold... Enormous fun' The Times 'With a well-crafted plot, an engaging protagonist, and astute nods to the literature and theological squabbles of the period, this is a perfect novel for a summer afternoon' Guardian 'A Dickensian glow pervades this immensely satisfying novel. Hugely enjoyable' James Runcie, author of the 'Grantchester Mysteries' 'Pure delight' Sunday Times

This book is an economic, historical, and sociological examination of rural textile industries in the Lower Rhineland beginning in the sixteenth century, culminating with the age of factory organization in the early 1800s. Drawing on archival sources not available to English language readers, the late Kisch analyzes the evolution of entrepreneurial innovations, the growth of a skilled labor force and changes in institutional mechanisms and patterns of social behavior that prepared this critical economic region for the innovation of factory production that came with the industrial revolution.