Two explorers set out on a journey from which only one of them will return. Their unknown land is that often fearsome continent we call the 20th Century. Their route is through their own minds and memories. Both travellers are professional historians still tormented by their own unanswered questions.

Mighty Lewd Books describes the emergence of a new home-grown English pornography as seen in flagellation novellas which burst to the fore in the 1770s. Through an examination of British erotica, Peakman looks at sex as seen in eighteenth-century erotic culture, religion and medicine, in this radical approach to the study of sexuality.

Covers various themes that contribute to modern Christmas: its Anglo-German origins and the idea of the bourgeois Christmas expressing family virtues; the need for a touchstone with the past in an age of rapid expansion and thus the myth of Merrie England; and the revival of English music: in short, all the elements making up the modern Christmas.

Peopled by many of the legends of the Australian outback, this is the extraordinary true story of how one ordinary woman grew up to champion Australia's outback heritage.