This new book about the 1st Duke of Wellington provides a novel take on the traditional biography in that it explores the life of this complex man through portraits - of Wellington himself, his friends, family and associates, as well as his political and military allies and opponents. There are examples of painted portraits by Goya and Thomas Lawrence, several caricatures that illustrate Wellington's political career, and a watercolour by George Chinnery that shows the future duke as a young Major - General at the Chepauk Palace, Madras being received by Azim al - Daula, Nawab o f the Carnatic, in February 1805. Also reproduced is a rare photograph, a Daguerreotype, made by Antoine Claudet on the occasion of Wellington's seventy - fifth birthday in 1844, and sections of a sixty - six - foot roll from the Collection of the National Portr ait Gallery depicting his entire funeral procession. Paul Cox explores Wellington's military career and the battle of Waterloo, which remain central to his story, but also examines his personal relationships, his legacy and his enduring place in the popu lar imagination. Finally, a narrative chronology presents a useful overview of Wellington's life and times.

In this compelling book, Richard Holmes tells the exhilarating story of the Duke of Wellington, Britain's greatest ever soldier.

Soldier, hero, and politician, the Duke of Wellington is one of the best-known figures of nineteenth-century England. From his victory at Waterloo over Napoleon in 1815, he rose to become prime minister of his country. But Peter Sinnema finds equal fascination in Victorian England’s response to the duke’s death. The Wake of Wellington considers Wellington’s spectacular funeral pageant in the fall of 1852—an unprecedented event that attracted one and a half million spectators to London—as a threshold event against which the life of the soldier-hero and High Tory statesman could be re-viewed and represented. Canvassing a profuse and dramatically proliferating Wellingtoniana, Sinnema examines the various assumptions behind, and implications of, the Times’s celebrated claim that the Irish-born Wellington “was the very type and model of an Englishman.” The dead duke, as Sinnema demonstrates, was repeatedly caught up in interpretive practices that stressed the quasi-symbolic relations between hero and nation. The Wake of Wellington provides a unique view of how in death Wellington and his career were promoted as the consummation of a national destiny intimately bound up with Englishness itself, and with what it meant to be English at midcentury.

Throughout the centuries, different cultures have established a variety of procedures for handling and disposing of corpses. Often the methods are directly associated with the deceased's position in life, such as a pharaoh's mummification in Egypt or the cremation of a Buddhist. Treatment by the living of the dead over time and across cultures is the focus of study. Burial arrangements and preparations are detailed, including embalming, the funeral service, storage and transport of the body, and forms of burial. Autopsies and the investigative process of causes of deliberate death are fully covered. Preservation techniques such as cryonic suspension and mummification are discussed, as well as a look at the recycling of the corpse through organ donation, donation to medicine, animal scavengers, cannibalism, and, of course, natural decay and decomposition. Mistreatments of a corpse are also covered.