Some of Oscar Wilde's biographers are persons who had only a nodding acquaintance with him, and others had no acquaintance at all. But in their writings there is one name which is linked with Wilde's and is second only in importance to it—the name of Lord Alfred Douglas. After long years Lord Alfred has decided to break the silence and to give the real facts about his relations with Wilde from the period when Wilde was at the top of his fame to the time of his tragedy and death. "Oscar Wilde and Myself" contains a serious side inasmuch as it deals with the grave disasters which this friendship has brought upon Lord Alfred. It possesses another side in the analysis of the purely literary aspect of Wilde's work; and a large number of anecdotes and sayings of Wilde are included which have never before been printed. It gives also an account of the Wilde circle, which included the most prominent persons of the period. Of Lord Alfred Douglas's literary gifts his worst enemy is in no doubt, and this work, apart from its great personal import, will give the quietus to much that is false which has grown round the Oscar Wilde tradition.
BELGIUM, HER KINGS, KINGDOM, AND PEOPLE. By John de Courcy Macdonnell. Fully illustrated. Demy 8vo. Price 15s. net.
The lives of Leopold I., Leopold II., and King Albert told with a wealth of intimate detail which up till now has been withheld, the true story of the Belgian Revolution, untold by any English writer ere this, and much that is new and interesting about all the leading people in Belgium, from Royalties to Anarchists. The author describes the Belgian people, their mode of living, their thrift, their industry—the country itself, the forests, the mining districts, the crowded cities—and throws fresh light on many aspects of Belgian politics.
THE BONDS OF AFRICA. By Owen Letcher, F.R.G.S., Author of "Big Game Hunting in North-Eastern Rhodesia." With 50 Illustrations from Photographs and a Map. Demy 8vo. Price 12s. 6d. net.
Mr. Owen Letcher is a young Englishman who has spent the past eleven years in Africa and has wandered into well-nigh unknown portions of the Dark Continent to hunt big game and to pry into the lives of the natives inhabitant of the remotest corners of it. Quite apart from its value to the traveller, the sportsman, and the student of natural history, the book possesses a remarkable human interest. Mr. Letcher knows Africa from Cape Town to the City of the Pharaohs, and, as the work covers an enormous field of but little known land in Southern, North-Western and North-Eastern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, British East Africa, and Uganda, its merits from a geographical point of view are undoubted.
MADAME DU BARRY. By Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. With Photogravure and numerous other Portraits. Demy 8vo. Price 12s. 6d. net.
One of the most marvellously minute and realistic specimens of biography to be found. No pains have been spared to obtain all the information available with reference to the extraordinary woman who, born out of wedlock in the little French town of Vaucouleurs, became the mistress of Louis XV., and after a career of reckless extravagance, perished on the guillotine.
STORIES OF SOCIETY. By Charles E. Jerningham ("Marmaduke" of Truth). With numerous Portraits. Demy 8vo. Price 10s. 6d. net.
In his life spent amongst the clubs and the drawing-rooms of Mayfair the author (for more than twenty years "Marmaduke" of Truth) has become familiar with the skeletons lurking in the cupboards of Society, and there is no writer of to-day who is more fully or happily equipped to fulfil the function of a social satirist.
THE PURPOSE: Reflections and Digressions. By Hubert Wales. With Portrait. Crown 8vo. Price 5s. net.