FAMOUS LAST WORDS

Sub-titled 'Confessions, Humour and Bravery of the Departing', "From medieval beheadings, Victorian hangings, deathbed confessions and even heartbreaking suicide notes, Wood has created a thoroughly dark and entertaining book looking at various individuals who left a mark on history as they departed from the world." Nothing focuses the mind more starkly than impending death. Prepare to mount the scaffold and share in the final utterings of the condemned; join the stricken in their death beds and witness unburdened tongues wag their closing, and often remarkable confessions as deeply entrenched secrets are finally unshackled in the wake of imminent death. Revealed inside are tales of sangfroid bravery, astonishing ironies and overdue confessions often betraying grave miscarriages of justice throughout British history. Writer and poet Sir Walter Raleigh had some typically forthright and urging words for his executioner as the hesitant axeman displayed fear and reluctance to perform his stately duties. Raleigh would offer goading encouragement to his maker. Were the final words of convicted murderer Ernest Brown a candid confession to another killing he had committed deep in the Northumberland Moors some two years previously which had lay unsolved? And what of Britain's first actor to have had a knighthood bestowed upon him? Learn of the staggering irony that saw his final words on stage prophetically turn out to be his last in life. "My favourites to read about were on Lady Jane Grey, William Burke and Frederick Fleet... he's the man who spotted the iceberg on the Titanic!" 216 page paperback, 32 illus.