This historical account, covering the 1890s to 1969, includes the emergence of medical, and then official, concern about the three diseases related to asbestos (asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma), the legislative process during and after the 1930s, and the impact of the 1931 Asbestos Industry Regulations. The availability of much previously unexamined material, including copious government records, combined with unimpeded access to the vast archive of documents kept by the leading British asbestos manufacturer, Turner and Newall, have enabled Dr. Bartrip to provide a comprehensive examination of this important medico-legal question, and to give a unique insight into occupational health and its regulation in twentieth century Britain.

Archer Coe, master hypnotist, is back to performing by day and consulting for the rich and influential by night. Most of his cases are mundane—save his most recent, which ended in quite a few deaths—and that's what Archer expects from his newest client, heiress Nicolette Hardy. Her mother's untimely death has sent her father into a deep depression, and a self-proclaimed mystic, Jane Collins, has taken advantage of his grief by promising him an audience with his dead wife. Archer knows Jane, and he believes she's a fraud. But he has trouble convincing Nicolette's father, and as strange happenings unfold around him, Archer soon has trouble convincing himself. It's clear Jane holds some power—but it's also clear that Jane has no idea how much. Will Archer save Jane and the Hardys before her power becomes uncontrollable? Or will this case be his final curtain?

The subject of this modern classic is not a man. "It is an event," says Jules Romains, who is considered "the French Dos Passos." The event starts with the death of Jacques Godard, a man of no importance. It unfolds through his brief survival in the minds of others - the porter of his tenement in Paris, his fellow lodgers, a few acquaintances, his old father, who comes up from the country for the funeral, a young stranger who feels that the dead pass into "a great soul that cannot die." The event expresses Romains's belief in "collective beings," the famous theory of "Unanimism." In dramatizing his theory, Romains developed an advanced motion-picture technique when films were in their infancy, a technique of group portraits and sudden shifts from scene to scene that keeps this work far ahead of conventional novels. Here, Romains explores the ideas and the devices used in his twenty-seven-volume masterpiece, Men of Good Will, which André Maurois calls "the boldest attempt to describe completely his own time that any French novelist has made since Balzac."

A magnificent tale of heart-stopping suspense from the highly acclaimed master of the genre.