This romantic mystery - or mysterious romance - tells the tale of jilted lover, Jim Conrad, who discovers an unusual gold ring while on a visit to Paris. What is the story of the ring? Why is Clelia Vine so sad? Who is the nameless 'chief'? And how is a dour English barber in a Parisian salon mixed up in all this?The novel, published in 1896, was written by Justin McCarthy, an Irish nationalist, Liberal historian, novelist and politician. (Introduction by Ruth Golding)

In the South African wilderness, six men got together to mine for diamonds and become very rich. They agree that the wealth is to be split equally between them or their heirs after a few years and that the share of any one who died without leaving an heir or whose heir died before the time would be split between the remaining partners. Soon, all heirs are notified and wait expectantly for the first of January, on which the diamonds are to be divided between the partners. However, the diamonds are becoming increasingly blood stained, and January the first is still some time off...

In Volume III of this series on the Hanoverian Kings, Justin McCarthy is joined by his son, Justin Hartly McCarthy, a liberal Irish MP like his father. Together they bring to life, poor stubborn George III, the outrageous radical, John Wilkes, the rebellious American Colonies, great-hearted Charles James Fox, the Gordon Riots which set London ablaze, Edmund Burke, Britain's problematic Indian policy, and the brave, enigmatic Younger Pitt, who faced national fears of the spread of revolution across the Channel from France and then confronted the imminent threat of invasion by the armies of Napoleon.

Justin McCarthy (1830-1912), liberal member of Parliament and historian. He brings the great 18th Century personalities to life: Walpole and Swift, Bolingbroke and Mary Wortley Montagu, the Old Pretender and Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the four King Georges. The first volume begins with the death of Queen Anne in 1714 and ends in 1733, with Robert Walpole fleeing Parliament as London erupts in rioting over his excise scheme.

Justin McCarthy (1830-1912), liberal member of Parliament and historian. He brings the great 18th Century personalities to life: Walpole and Swift, Bolingbroke and Mary Wortley Montagu, the Old Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the four King Georges. This second volume brings us the terrible death of Queen Caroline, Swift and Stella, the Jacobite rising of 1745, the Wesleyan Movement, Clive's victories, and the struggle for Canada.

Anne Stuart , Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, succeeded William III to the throne in 1702. She was the daughter of the deposed Catholic king, James II, but was of the Anglican faith. Liberal, Irish member of Parliament, Justin McCarthy, writing in 1902, creates in sparkling, uncluttered prose a panoramic canvas of Anne and her times. In the first of the two volumes, the brilliant commander, the Duke of Marlborough, defeats the French and Bavarians at the Battle of Blenheim, while the flagship of the admiral of the fleet, Sir Cloudesley Shovell, strikes the rocks near the Isles of Scilly and is lost with all eight hundred hands...

William Ewart Gladstone , four times Prime Minister of Great Britain, dominated the Liberal Party for thirty years, but ultimately divided it over the issue of Irish Home Rule, which he unsuccessfully championed. He brought to parliamentary politics a moral fervor which made him the personification of the Victorian Age, but which also challenged the complacency of its imperialistic assumptions. In this 1897 biography, the Liberal Irish member of Parliament, Justin McCarthy, presents a Gladstone still...

Anne Stuart , Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, succeeded William III to the throne in 1702. She was the daughter of the deposed Catholic king, James II, but was of the Anglican faith. Liberal, Irish member of Parliament, Justin McCarthy, writing in 1902, creates in sparkling, uncluttered prose a panoramic canvas of Anne and her times. In the second of the two volumes, McCarthy describes the Battle of Malplaquet, where Marlborough meets the French in "a contest of hand-to-hand fighting on a gigantic scale...

An engaging history of Great Britain in the heyday of Queen Victoria and of her empire by the liberal Irish Member of Parliament, Justin McCarthy. He brings us the larger than life personalities of the day, Victoria and Albert, Russell and Peel, O'Connell and Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli, and relates great events, the Afghan War, the Irish famine, and the Crimean War without ever losing sight of the hopes and fears of the common people at home and abroad.

Volume II of this popular history opens in the revolutionary year, 1848, with the Chartist movement for manhood suffrage and with the rise of Young Ireland. Next we join the crowds in 1851 at the opening of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, of which Queen Victoria wrote, ''A little rain fell just as we started, but before we came near the Crystal Palace the sun shone and gleamed upon the gigantic edifice, upon which the flags of all nations were floating.'' Hopes for a new era of peace expired in...

Volume III of this history of Victorian Britain begins in 1856 with the gunboat diplomacy of the Second Opium War and then moves to the harrowing days of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. In June 1858, Benjamin Disraeli secures passage of the Jews Relief Act and Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild takes his seat in Parliament. Prince Albert dies after a short illness in December 1861, leaving a distraught and cloistered Queen. Lord Palmerston's diplomacy increases Britain's influence on the Continent, while the Civil War in America divides the country in surprising ways. Bismarck emerges and Prussia begins her ascent to power.

The fourth and concluding volume of this history of Victorian Britain opens with the brutal repression in 1865 of a rebellion by ex-slaves in Jamaica. Then in 1867, the Conservative Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, takes his celebrated "leap in the dark" with the passage of the most comprehensive expansion of manhood suffrage in British history. The Fenian movement agitates unsuccessfully for Irish independence. British trade unions win the right to organize. William Ewart Gladstone launches his great reform ministry by abolishing in Ireland the hated Anglican establishment and follows with a flood of bills reforming education, the British army, and poor relief...