Frances Larson Books

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Katherine Routledge, Maria Czaplicka, Winifred Blackman, Beatrice Blackwood and Barbara Freire-Marreco set out to explore the furthest reaches of the globe. Resisting pernicious sexism and misogyny, they were among the first women to study at university and went on to chart now-vanished worlds, seeking new freedoms in in the wastelands of Siberia, the uncharted interior of New Guinea, on Easter Island, and in the villages of the Nile. Yet upon their return to England, they found only loss, madness and regret waiting for them. An extraordinary insight into women's suffrage at the turn of the century and a revelatory study of Britain's colonial legacy, Undreamed Shores is an extraordinary portrait of a pioneering quintet whose struggles helped usher in a brighter dawn.

A serious and seriously entertaining exploration of the dark and varied obsessions that the 'civilized West' has had with decapitated heads and skulls

The human head is exceptional. It accommodates four of our five senses, encases the brain and boasts the most expressive set of muscles in the body. It is our most distinctive attribute and it connects our inner selves to the outer world more evocatively than any other part of the body. Yet there is a dark side to the head's pre-eminence. Over the centuries, human heads have decorated our churches, festooned our city walls and filled our museums. Long regarded as objects of fascination and repulsion, they have been props for artists and specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of barter. Today, as videos of decapitations circulate online and scientists promise the wealthy among us that our heads may one day live on without our bodies, the severed head is as contentious and compelling as ever.From the western colonialists whose demand for shrunken heads spurred brutal massacres to the troops in the Second World War who sent the remains of Japanese soldiers home to their girlfriends; from the memento mori in Romantic portraits to Damien Hirst's With Dead Head; from grave-robbing phrenologists to enterprising cryonicists, Larson explores the bizarre, often gruesome and confounding history of the severed head. Its story is our story.