Phoenix Paperback

PrologueMany people dream about making the world a better place, but I have been fortunate in being able to fulfill my dreams more than most. That said, my influence has been greatly exaggerated. I was labeled "the man who broke the Bank of England" when the United Kingdom was forced to leave the...

Chapter One May 1924, London I followed my brother across a plateau where a bitter wind howled and flashes filled the sky. A sudden glare revealed churned earth and a monstrous coil of metal. My brother marched ahead, immaculate in cap and pressed uniform. I tried to keep up but floundered...

Chapter oneirlmI IIDuring the long vacation, that fallow summer period falling between the end of the Trinity Term and the beginning of the Michaelmas Term, the Iims of Court in the City of London fall into a drowse. The air barely lifts the leaves of the lofty plane trees, the lanes and courtyards...

Cbaptei- One Present I i ¦¦ On the morning of that day Helena received a letter from a | stranger. / : I F/atj, 2j Greville Rd, N' Putney SWis |i March igg2 Dear Helena Mayrick, ^ * I am writing to you because you are a researcher and the granddaughter of Hubert Donaldson, the...

X hat night, you dreamt, that instead of dying fresh as a blade of grass, last year, one winter afternoon, your sister had lingered, until her flesh had blackened so that the moonstone on her finger stood a monstrous white against her charred skin, and the whitewashed walls beside her bed,...

Note on the Author and Editor WILLIAM WILKIE COLLINS (1824-89) was bom in London, the son of a popular landscape painter. In 1846 he entered Lincoln's Inn as a law student. He met and befriended Charles Dickens (1812-70) in 1851 and contributed to Household Words and All the Year Round. In the...

Commissioner Gauche At Port Said a new passenger had boarded the Leviathan, occupying stateroom No. i8, the last first-class cabin still vacant, and Gustave Gauche's humour had immediately improved. This newcomer looked highly promising: that self-assured and unhurried way of carrying himself,...

Introduction to the iç8ç Edition Looking back over three decades to the pubhcation in i960 of my first book, I can still recapture the feeling of intense excitement when I learned it had been accepted by Victor Gollancz, whom I had long admired from afar as founder of the pre-war Left Book...