Lempriere's Dictionary - Poche

At the seventeenth century opens, a band of venturers forms the Honourable Company of Merchants trading from England to the East Indies. In France, the siege of La Rochelle ends with the massacre of thirty thousand men, women and children. Almost two centuries later in 1788, John Lemprière published his classical dictionary. This much is fact. Lawrence Norfolk tells us how the first two events led, inescapably, to the third.
This amazing tale encompasses the Great Voyages of Discovery and multinational financial conspiracies, and leads a motley cast of scholars and eccentrics, drunken aristocrats and whores, assassins and octogenarian pirates through two centuries and three continents to the brink of the French Revolution. John Lemprière reluctantly enters this world as an introverted scholar, obsessed by the myths of antiquity.
At the end of this astonishing story he understands that it takes far more than learning to lay the ghosts of the past to rest.