The Viper of Milan

Fourteenth-century Lombardy, the Visconti tyrant of Milan and the Della Scala prince he has broken - a book with no hero in it and a villain of real magnificence. Marjorie Bowen wrote it at sixteen; a string of publishers turned it down before it appeared in 1906. This edition is bound with a gallery of 53 plates, among them paintings by Edvard Munch, Anton Raphael Mengs, Giovanni Paolo Panini and Bernardo Bellotto, dating from 1701 to 1911.