Duel - Hardcover

"A Scoundrel only needs to fight a duel and he ceases to be a scoundrel." Jean-Jacques Rousseau "Poulain de St Foix, a French gentleman and writer, was once challenged to a duel by a man whom he asked to sit further away because he stank. ' "I will fight you if you insist, but I don't see how that will end the matter,' St Foix told the malodorous man. 'If you kill me, I shall smell too. If I kill you, you will smell, if possible, worse than you do at present." Philip Rush

In 1826 a merchant called David Landale shot dead his bank manager in what was one of Britain's last recorded fatal duels. Two centuries later, newly discovered legal archives have made it possible for one of his descendents, James Landale, to reconstruct this duel and the circumstances surrounding it. With painstaking detail, Duel gives fresh insight into why two rational, educated human beings in the 1820s might choose to resolve a dispute by shooting at one another. Landale also tells the story of duelling itself, explaining where it came from, and why it suddenly lost its social legitimacy in the middle of the 19th century. Above all, Duel grippingly explains why this curious thing called honour drove so many young men to death