For years, Laurence Bounds has been pestering some of the most patient customer service departments from coffee companies to television studios and shaving companies to travel agents, with his maddening of letters. From HMV to AEG, the Met Office to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra - everyone is a target. Discover years of hilarious letters sent from the Etruria Lodge estate by the eccentric but highly-educated, Laurence Bounds (B.A, B.Sc). So who is Laurence Bounds, we hear you ask? A part-time gamekeeper, Bachelor of Fine Arts, Bachelor of Science, inventor of the WaspZapper 838™, producer of the famous Bombardier Potato, founder of The Mobile Judge Programme, dog food pioneer, betting tycoon, playwright supremo, wine magnate, children's life-size Henry VIII doll designer, poet, astrologer, published author and aspiring television producer, to name but a few. Upon buying this educational book, you may learn some of Laurence’s tips and become a serial entrepreneur just like him. Discover how to complain the Bounds way, how to communicate effectively with some of the world's biggest companies, and how to deal with organisations when they are not keen on your ideas. Join him on a side-splitting journey, guaranteed to have you in stitches, as you meet his friends, relatives, and his beloved thoroughbred black Labrador, Alexander IX. This is Laurence Bounds, his life in his own words…

The Limits of Love: The Lives of D. H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen provides a candid look at two illustrious people who tested the capacity—and the limits—of marriage. The Lawrences come alive not as simple quarreling travelers, nor as blissful domestic partners, but as complex personalities who experimented with marriage to see if it would fulfill their needs. Their antagonisms and their sexual experiences informed Lawrence’s fearless novels The Rainbow and Women in Love. Both works also tested the boundaries of public taste and faced harsh receptions. The cost of the Lawrences’ strong but unstable marriage was high. Despite periods of happiness and peace, angry clashes meant separations and uneasy agreements to repair the marital intimacy when it cracked. Fractures of 1916, 1919, 1923, and 1926 healed slowly and with difficulty. In Lawrence’s most calculated and famous work, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he successfully coded their marital stress and, full of rage, fused two stories of failed marriages. Drawing on many unpublished and recently discovered letters, The Limits of Love offers readers a detailed reconstruction of two complicated lives, written with narrative speed and a forceful style, filled with vivid interpretations of Lawrence’s work, and conveying deep sympathy for people living outside established norms. This new dual biography, based on years of research by Michael Squires, captures the essence of Lawrence and Frieda, making the couple real, alive, and accessible.

Volume I gives the first 580 letters, covering the period September 1901 to May 1913.

Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.