Charles I

Draws on recent interpretations of the period to re-evaluate Charles I's reign. This work analyses the reign of Charles I against the background of his father's legacy and the problems he inherited. The study assesses Charles's own methods and style of government, suggesting that these were mainly to blame for the difficulties he encounted.

List of members in each volume.

Since this book was first published a large amount of new material on the king and his reign has emerged. This book contains a new preface which takes account of the new work.

Cape Cod families are difficult to trace because only the probate records survived the burning of the Barnstable County Courthouse in 1827, and similar disasters have taken their toll on the Cape's town records. Many of Chatham's records, for instance, were lost in a fire, and Yarmouth's records of the Revolutionary War period have been missing for years. Even so, many important Cape Cod town records still exist; the problem is that so few of them are in print. So it was fortuitous when Col. Leonard Smith stumbled upon a series of pamphlets published at Yarmouthport by Charles W. Swift in the early part of this century under the name Cape Cod Library of History and Genealogy. Although contributors to the Cape Cod Library included such celebrated genealogists as Josiah Paine (author of History of Harwich), William C. Smith (known for his History of Chatham), and Amos Otis (Genealogical Notes of Barnstable Families), the series never reached a large audience, and is today virtually inaccessible. No library in the country holds the complete collection of 108 pamphlets. With great diligence, Col. Smith put together a complete collection for himself, arranged the pamphlets in the order in which they were published, and then, to make the material usable, compiled an index of names.--From publisher description.

Volume Four of Noël Coward's plays contains a selection of Coward's plays from the thirties and forties which includes Blithe Spirit, a comedy that centres around the spirit medium Madame Arcati. The play that mocks sudden death was produced at precisely the moment when bombs were bringing it to Britain "I shall ever be grateful, for the almost psychic gift that enabled me to write Blithe Spirit in five days during one of the darkest years of the war." The play was for years the longest-running comedy in the history of British theatre. Present Laughter follows the life of Garry Essendine, a world-weary, middle-aged projection of the dilettante, debonair persona - self-obsessed and dressing-gowned who struts through the play like an educated peacock. It is a comedy about the 'theatricals' that Noël best knew and loved, and was originally a star vehicle for himself. It is the closest to an autobiographical play that Coward ever wrote. This Happy Breed is a saga of a lower middle-class family; and three shorter pieces fromTonight at 8.30 - is a farce set in the South of France, and serves as an oblique tribute to Frederick Lonsdale; The Astonished Heart is about the decay of a psychiatrist's mind through personal sexual obsession. Red Peppers, which closes the volume, was a cynical tribute to the lost music halls of the First World War.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1864.