When even Frenchmen forget that the guillotine is still used in the twentieth century, it is time to present the facts about its origins, its history and its methods of operation. Originally invented to satisfy the humanitarian and egalitarian impulses of the French revolutionaries, the guillotine will be forever identified with the blood and terror of that epoch. While decapitation was no doubt "an advance on burning, disembowelling, strangling and such other ingenuities," the question still remains as to whether death by the guillotine is instantaneous, or whether consciousness survives decapitation. What was the attitude of the headsman who performed his grisly task time and again with apparent unconcern? And of the crowd who watched and applauded? These and other questions Alister Kershaw discusses frankly and with scrupulous regard for historical accuracy.

This is a book which will surprise and horrify. It is a unique peice of macabre history.

"All the known and hitherto unknown facts about la machine in a style as swift, sharp and cynical as the knife itself." - THE TIMES

First published by John Calder (Publications) Ltd
© Alister Kershaw
Tandem Edition 1965
Tandem Books Ltd, 33 Beauchamp Place, London, SW3

Lancashire in the time of Cromwell, a county cursed, like the rest of England, by civil war and beliefs in witchcraft...

Accused of the murder of her husband by witchcraft, Mary Standen is only saved from hanging by the intervention of a young commander of a Troop of Horse as she lies naked and bound hand and foot. That same night, as an unwilling witness to a graveyard orgy, she sees for herself that there is indeed a witch coven in the village. Refusing to betray the participants, some of whom she knows, she finds suspicion once more pointing at her, and as the scene is set for a double battle - between royalists and parliamentarians and the witches and their persecutors - Mary is forced to flee for safety at the same time as the Scots march into Preston and Cromwell comes through the hills from Skipton.

First published by Hutchinson & Co Ltd 1967. - First Arrow edition 1968
Third impression July 1973

Arrow Books Ltd, 3 Fitzroy Square, London W1.