"A visionary and a madman" was how one British statesman, Lord Carteret, described Theodore von Neuhoff. This exciting biography, Theodore von Neuhoff, King of Corsica: The Man behind the Legend by Julia Gasper, traces the unlikely career of the German baron who in 1736 had himself crowned the King of Corsica. Theodore von Neuhoff's career spanned the entire European continent and his role in the Corsican rebellion against Genoa was as bold and unconventional as everything else in his life. Mixing with royalty, rogues and rabble, he was successively a soldier, secret agent, Jacobite, speculator, alchemist, cabbalist, Rosicrucian, astrologer, fraudster, and spy. He had changed his name several times, abducted a nun and seen the inside of several prisons before turning his hand to revolution. Neuhoff had daring far-sighted ideas about religious tolerance and the abolition of slavery that turned the Corsican rebellion into a significant political event with repercussions way beyond the shores of one small island. Denounced as an arch-criminal, traitor and seditious heretic, he survived pursuit by the agents of the Genoese Republic for twenty years with a price on his head, dodging assassination attempts while meeting countless famous and fascinating people. Valuable to the British as a political tool against the French, he spent his old age in relative comfort in an English debtors' prison. Theodore von Neuhoff, King of Corsica argues that despite all his eccentricity Neuhoff was still a significant Enlightenment figure.

Reproduction of the original: Wanderings in Corsica by Alexander Muir

Did you give school history lessons your undivided attention? Even if you did, youre probably none the wiser as to how exactly Henry II of France came to have a two-foot splinter in his head or why Alexandra of Bavaria believed she had swallowed a piano. Or where terms like bunkum, maverick, John Bull and taking the mickey come from; or how the Tsarina of Russia once saved a life with a comma; or why Robert Pate hit Queen Victoria on the head with a walking stick. For some unknown reason the most interesting bits of history are kept out of lessons and away from syllabuses. Relegated to historys footnotes, they lie buried beneath the dense text like a few golden nuggets in a mountain of granite. Now The Interesting Bits rights this wrong; it is a veritable treasure trove of those surprising, eccentric, chaotic, baffling asides that dont fit neatly into historys official narrative. They are historys little-known treasures the gems that generations of teachers have excised from lessons on the grounds that they might make history too much like, well, fun.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.