Sir Charles Dilke was born in 1843 and died in 1911. His career is one of the mysteries and tragedies of nineteenth-century history. In the summer of 1885 he was the youngest man in the outgoing cabinet and Gladstone's most likely successor as leader of the Liberal Party. But his great expectations were shattered when in July 1885 Donald Crawford, a Liberal candidate, began divorce proceedings against his twenty-two-year-old wife, citing Dilke as co-respondent. There were two hearings, during the second of which Mrs Crawford made the most sensational allegations and in the end Dilke lost. He maintained his innocence to his dying day and despite his public disgrace there were many who believed him. First published in 1958, Dilke is a story with a climax as exciting as it is mysterious and which bears continuing relevance to the private lives of public figures.

From the author of The Inheritance and Secret Relations comes a Romeo and Juliet tale centering on a wonderful old English ancestral home that had once been a Cistercian abbey. Almost a year on from the loss of their precious abbey, the Delancey family remains devastated. The abbey had been the uninterrupted home of Delanceys since the sixteenth century. To compound the insult, they have lost it to their archenemies: the family of their old gardener, Stanley Trafford---who was dismissed and evicted, along with his family, by Laura’s grandfather Edmund in 1947. But now Stanley’s son is a millionaire, intent on avenging his father. . . . Stanley Trafford and Edmund Delancey were boyhood friends. When both men married, just before the war, the couples became inseparable, with the two women---Hester and Effie---offering comfort to each other while their husbands fought in the same regiment. So what really happened on that fateful morning in 1947, to poison their friendship for nearly forty years? This magical story follows two warring families---the Traffords and the Delanceys---over the course of one devastating year, in which old secrets catch them up and turn everything upside down.