Books published by Tiger of the Stripe

British journalist Hilary Blyth famously liked a drop or two as well as a midnight dip, and when his body was fished out of the sea near the infamous Denti dei Cani Rocks, the verdict was accidental death. His widow disagreed, but she went a little crazy after her husband's death and everyone was highly relieved when she returned to England...A year later, three people converge on a secluded Italian coastal idyll. None of them is on holiday: the Hon. Veronica Dearborn (previously encountered in The Mischief-Maker) has refused to sell the film rights of her notorious memoir, and escapes London and her unscrupulous agent on a commission to interview J. Cadwallader Jones, the eccentric widower of a famous mystery novelist. Her old friend, food-writer Freddy Partridge, is on a working vacation, and hoping his Uncle Cadwallader is not spending all his inheritance. Julian Blyth, an injured orchestral violinist, has come to settle the estate of his late brother.Welcomed and feted at first by the tight-knit ex-pat community, the three visitors quickly realise they have stepped on a nest of vipers, and Julian begins to have doubts that his brother's death was the accident it seemed.A sophisticated satire, Circled By The Sands displays the ex-pat middle-classes at their hilariously appalling worst. Monte Farfalla is home to a community with little in common apart from its mother-tongue, driven by competition, jealousy, gossip, greed and bickering. When faced with threat from outside, however, they close ranks...

A swooping, evocative tale spanning nearly fifty years, The Mischief-Maker is a story of ambition, hubris and retribution. From the sixties to the present, from England and Ireland to Italy and the United States, we follow the lives of a diverse group of people whose fates are inextricably caught up, whether they know it or not. No-one - not the government minister, the cabaret artist, the television personality, the forgotten pop star or the academic's widow - is immune from a certain malign influence. Secrets long hidden come back to destroy them. Someone who remembers all too well has known them all. The Mischief-Maker is a subtle, noirish tragicomedy, one which sweeps the reader along and creates an intense interest in what happens next, and to whom, and why. JULIA LACEY BROOKE read English Literature and Renaissance History at the University of East Anglia, later taking an MLitt at the University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. Now based in rural Tuscany, she is a freelance editor, teacher and lecturer. Her The Stoic, the Weal & the Malcontent, a fascinating study of the malcontent on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, was published by Tiger of the Stripe in 2013.

This fascinating book describes the history of Oxford University's great academic library, from the foundation of Cobham's Library in 1367, Richard de Bury's library at Durham College, Duke Humphrey's Library, Sir Thomas Bodley's bequest and on to the late nineteenth century.Macray's scholarly work abounds with fascinating detail and draws not only on the Bodleian's official archives but also many diaries and gossipy anecdotes. It comes as something of a shock to discover that one of Bodley's friends accused him of being 'so drunk with applause and vanitie of his librarie' that he disregarded the needs of his own family and servants. As late as 1712, Bodley's relations were appealing to the Vice Chancellor for relief from the direst poverty.Among the strange gifts received by the Bodleian was a half-burned Russian translation of the Pickwick Papers found at Sebastopol when the battery was stormed in 1855.

Enter the Malcontent... a misfit, an outcast, a 'strayer from the drove', one who laughs at the follies of others from a distance, like Jacques, or who snarls and rails acerbically like Thersites or Timon. Sometimes, like Iago, he has murder in his heart. He might be an alienated intellectual, like Bosola or Flamineo, with an education he cannot use, or a cynical adventurer like Bussy, or a revenger, like Vindice, out to right wrongs; a bastard like Edmund; a Jew like Barabas; an outcast, a social climber, a man with a deformity, a man passed over for office, a professional clown with ambitions, a professional soldier with a grudge, a Prince with an impossible mission, even a usurping king determined to 'prove a villain'... The Malcontent comes in various garbs and guises, sometimes glowering and dressed in black, and sometimes not. But his kind is legion, his intelligence rare, and he figures on the English stage at a uniquely innovative point in its history. The Jacobean stage Malcontent had his immediate antecedents in real life. He also had a dramatic ancestry in the medieval Vice and the Fool. His anarchic hey-day began in the late 1580s and was effectively over by the mid 1620s, but this brief period produced some of the most influential dramatists the Anglophone world has known, stage-writers of brilliance who were engaged in re-working Roman and Greek Classicism, and incorporating and adapting English medieval staples and histories in modern works which revolutionised stage business and stage language. By the time a play called The Malcontent by John Marston appeared in 1604, it was satirising a familiar phenomenon: not only of a stage figure, but of a whole tranche of plays and theatre-writing distinctly malcontented in tone and matter. Written and performed in a time of new intellectual inquiry and a spirit of scepticism regarding the old fixtures of Man's place in the World and the political and religious structures that underpinned it - a time of social flux, of discovery of new worlds, of war, spying, bitter religious faction, and political and economic uncertainty - these works were presenting a diverse public audience with the exciting and possibly terrifying spectacle of this fixture's actual fragility, and the capacity of Man to challenge his destiny. The author's remarkably perceptive The Stoic, the Weal and the Malcontent sheds new light on the the development and relevance of the Malcontent in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.   Julia Lacey Brooke read English Literature and Renaissance History at the University of East Anglia, later taking an MLitt at the University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. Now based in rural Tuscany, she is a freelance editor, teacher and lecturer, and writes satirical fiction.

It's 1938 and the world is changing quickly. Hitler is stirring the German nation into a xenophobic frenzy. Michael, a British officer in the Gurkhas serving in the North-West Frontier, is trying to keep the bloodthirsty and ruthless Afghan tribesmen, the Pathan, under control. The horrors perpetrated by the Pathan make Michael angry and vengeful. On leave in England, Michael finds that his war experiences have changed him and made him intolerant of the conventionality of British society. He begins to see his fiancée, Sarah, in a different light. On his return to India he seems to be heading for disaster...Julia Scott was born in Weymouth, Dorset. She attended Winchester School for Girls and gained a degree in French from Liverpool University. Her early working career was spent as a health journalist, and later as Editor of Director magazine for the Institute of Directors.In 1987 she married a neurologist and together they moved to Malta, and then to the United States where they lived for fifteen years before returning to England in 2005. In 2001 Julia was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and wrote Afghan Silk while fighting the disease and looking after her six children. She died aged 49 in 2006.

The biography of the comic actor Thomas Doggett and the famous Coat and Badge Race which he founded for watermen on the River Thames.Contents:Part I. The ManBy Theodore Andrea CookChapter I The Fame of Actors 3Chapter II Bartholomew Fair 10Chapter III Drury Lane 21Chapter IV Pugnacious Thomas 31Chapter V River Traffic and London Theatres 36Chapter VI Off the Stage 48Chapter VII Doggett's Bequest 60Part II.¿The RaceBy Guy NickallsChapter VIII Thames Watermen 71Chapter IX Some Famous Watermen, 1700-1800 81Chapter X History of Doggett's Race 86Chapter XI List of Winners 98Chapter XII Some Famous Winners 109Chapter XIII Accounts of the Best Races 116Chapter XIV Other Thames Wagers 167AppendicesAppendix I Epitome of The Country Wake 171Appendix II Notice of the Race Published in 1901 174Appendix III The Competitors for 1906 176Appendix IV Gravesend Watermen 177

William Coxe (1748-1828) was the stepson of Handel's amanuensis, John Christopher Smith. As such, he was ideally placed to write a biography of Smith, and also of Handel. These Anecdotes are therefore important sources for the lives of both composers. It is notable that many of the subscribers were close friends of Smith.The style of the original 1799 text is refreshingly simple and unaffected, and little change has been necessary to make it accessible to the modern reader. An introduction, notes and index have been added.William Coxe was a talented writer and historian whose output include several travel books and volumes on both Robert and Horace Walpole. He died at the age of eighty in his parish of Bemerton, Wiltshire. John Sharp, in a letter to Constable, wrote that he 'died of old age, unable to contend with two helps of salmon in lobster sauce, washed down with large draughts of Perry'.

Despite their modest size, the Lays of Marie de France are among the finest flowerings of Medieval French literature. They are charming, witty, and imbued with the code of courtly love. This new edition of Edith Rickert's translations will appeal to the general reader as much as the medievalist.Marie de France is thought to have been a noblewoman from the Isle de France or Normandy, living in England in the middle of the twelfth century. Her tales draw on the stories of Brittany and of her adopted country.Edith Rickert (1871-1938), a talented linguist and medievalist, received her degree from Vassar in 1891, and returned there in 1897 to teach English. She received a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1899. In 1900 she went to England where she combined academic research with a busy career as a professional writer. She returned to the United States in 1909 and later lectured at the University of Chicago. During the First World War, she worked as a codebreaker.

Richard de Bury's Philobiblon, completed in 1345, is the great medieval treatise on the love of books. He was an obsessive book-collector who argued that no price should hinder someone from buying books. However, unlike many later bibliomaniacs, he appreciated them for their true value, as a sources of wisdom, rather than as artefacts.Richard de Bury (1281-1345) was one of the most powerful and influential men of his age. He was High Chancellor of England from 1334 to 1335 and Treasurer from 1335. However, it was as Bishop of Durham that he was in his true element, and it was in this role that his book-collecting can be seen as a most philanthropic venture, building up a store of knowledge for present and future generations.