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Viscount Horatio Nelson (1758-1805), known as ‘The Hero’ during his own lifetime was both an inspiring commander and an innovative tactician, becoming a rear admiral after defeating the Spanish fleet at the Battle of Cape St Vincent. He was also responsible for the great victories of the Nile (1798) and Copenhagen (1801). Revered by his officers and men, he was renowned for both his arrogance and his scandalous love affair with the beautiful Emma Hamilton.

A fascinating glimpse into some of the most notorious crimes and trials of the last 100 years. Using the original trial transcripts, eyewitness accounts and contemporary newspaper reports, we witness the actual events that made each trial a cause célèbre of its day.

Dorothy Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in 1771, being one year younger than her brother William. After their mother died in 1778, they were separated and did not return to the Lake District until 1794, when they spent two happy months walking around the hills near Keswick, eventually settling down at Grasmere in 1799. The journals that Dorothy kept are remarkable for the detailed observations she makes of the surrounding countryside and people, often providing glimpses of poverty and suffering, as well as displaying her complete love affair with nature.

In 1911, Captain Robert Falcon Scott went back to the huge frozen wasteland of the Antarctic with the intention of reaching the South Pole, by a long and terribly arduous trek across the ice. On finally reaching the pole, Scott and his comrades were devastated to find that they had been beaten by the Norwegian explorer Amundsen. With temperatures of minus 30, they began their slow journey back to their base.

Succeeding William IV in 1837, Victoria reigned for nearly 64 years and was always a keen chronicler of life around her, through both her paintings and the detailed diary she kept from the age of 13. Queen Victoria’s Highland Journals cover the period from 1848 to 1882 and provide a fascinating insight into those long 'never-to-be-forgotten days' she spent with her family in her much beloved Scottish Highlands.

The brief and tragic life of Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) is told through the beautiful and passionate letters written by Charlotte to her best friend Ellen Nussey. Born and brought up in the bleak Haworth parsonage with only her sisters and brother for company, she soon obtains employment as a Governess. Having travelled abroad to study languages in Brussels, she returns to the Yorkshire moors to join her family where she writes her most successful novel, Jane Eyre.

Born at Steventon in 1775, the daughter of a Hampshire clergyman, Jane Austen was the youngest of seven children. She lived a quiet life, moving to Bath, Southampton, Chawton and eventually to Winchester where she died unmarried in 1817 at the age of 42. It is to her elder sister Cassandra that most of her surviving letters are written, and through them, we discover the intimate world of the English gentry.

George Gordon Byron was born in 1788, the son of the profligate 'Mad Jack' Byron, and succeeded to the title in 1798 moving to the family seat of Newstead Abbey. He attended Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he proved to be a poor scholar, preferring boxing, the low life and poetry, publishing his first volume of poems in 1806. In 1809, at 21, he embarked on a grand tour of Europe and on his return to England he married the humourless Annabella Milbanke, who gave birth to his daughter Augusta in 1815.

In March 1950, Timothy Evans, aged 25, was hanged for the murder of his wife and child. Sixteen years, later the queen was to grant him a full pardon. So why did Timothy Evans confess to murder? Why was John Reginald Christie, his neighbour, not arrested until April Fool’s Day three years later? And what was the gruesome discovery behind the kitchen wall? The shocking truth of the sordid and tragic events that took place behind the doors of number 10 Rillington Place was to horrify the nation.

Mild-mannered Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen committed one of the most notorious English murders of the 20th century. In early 1910, he dismembered his wife's body and buried the remains in the coal cellar of the house they shared in Hilldrop Crescent, London. Arrested with his lover, Ethel Le Neve, who was disguised as his son, as they tried to escape to Canada aboard the SS Montrose. His subsequent trial at the Old Bailey was expected to be a mere formality, but Dr Crippen pleaded 'not guilty!', and so begins this strangely moving tale of passion and despair.

At 9 a.m. on Wednesday 13th July 1955, Ruth Ellis became the last woman to hang in Britain. Convicted of shooting her unfaithful lover, David Blakeley, in cold blood, as he stood by his sports car on Easter Sunday—the calm and dignified court appearance of this mother of two young children and the furore that accompanied her sentence, ensured that this trial was to have a memorable place in the annals of British justice.