Eccentric Lives, Peculiar Notions: True Tales of Flat-earthers, Head Drillers, Ufologists, Frantic Lovers, Welsh Druids, Finders of Lost Tribes and Other Obsessed Individuals - Tapa dura

Never has so much energy been poured into such oddly misbegotten ideas, inventions, enterprises and movements. The 22 individuals and groups documented in this book with such wit and sympathy represent the widest range of true eccentricity, including: - Persistent lover John Rutter Carden of Tipperary, who abducted an heiress - Sir Ian Stuart Knill of Burnham-on-Sea who claimed he was descended from King Arthur - Lady Blount of Kingston who surveyed the Bedford Levels to prove the Earth was flat - Colonel Sibthorp, MP for Lincoln, who opposed every Act and Reform in Parliament - Nesta Webster of Hertfordshire who (in the 1920s) invented Conspiracy Theory - Sir Francis Galton, whose crusaded for thoroughbred humans and pioneered Eugenics - Geoffrey Pyke from Suffolk, who invented battleships made of ice during WW1 - Comyns Beaumont who claimed the Holy Land was actually in Scotland - Edward Hine who created the myth that British people are the lost tribe of Israel - Amanda Fielding from London who invented trepanation - drilling a hole in your head! - Baconians v. Stratfordians - the strange legacy of the 'Bacon wrote Shakespeare' theorists * Well written, lively narrative non-fiction in short entertaining biographies of British eccentrics. Author lives in London.