Böcker av Keith Laidler

Forced to enter the Chinese Emperor's harem at the tender age of sixteen, Yehonala lost her family, her betrothed, and all hope of a normal life. Immured in the seraglio, her beauty and sexual expertise soon enthralled the Son of Heaven, and she was held in high favour as The Orchid, especially after presenting the Emperor with his only male heir. But even with this protection she was far from safe. Yehonala had entered the perilous world of the Forbidden City, a shadowy demimonde peopled by unscrupulous nobles and calculating eunuchs - a milieu of luxury and intrigue, compounded equally of tradition and corruption, where a misplaced word or unthinking gesture might swiftly prove fatal. Yet such was her own guile, courage and absolute refusal to countenance defeat, the Orchid slowly triumphed over every adversary to become Ci Xi, the Empress Dowager of China, and the most famous female autocrat in history.

Morose, cynical and given to drink, Sydney Carton is one of Charles Dickens' most famous characters; a dispassionate man, yet capable, in the final moments of 'A Tale Of Two Cities', of sacrificing himself beneath the guillotine for Lucy, the woman he both loved and lost.It now appears, however, that Dickens was being somewhat economical with the actualité. Newly recovered documents, written in Carton's own hand, tell a far different tale. Sydney Carton survived his execution, only to find himself at the mercy of the monstrous Robespierre, author of the Paris Terror. His love Lucy languishes in a French prison, her husband dead, and Carton can ensure her survival only by becoming Robespierre's personal spy. Reluctant, terrified and often drunk, Carton blunders his way through the major events of the Revolution, grudgingly partaking in some of the blackest deeds of the Terror and, by a mixture of cowardice, bravado and luck, lending a hand in the fall of most of its leading figures. Kidnapped by the British, he finds himself a double agent, trusted by neither side. Carton's outrageous memoirs record the slow decay of revolutionary ideals and, in passing, cast light on the true parentage of that sadistic villain of 'Tom Browne's Schooldays', the beastly Flashman.