Stephen Bates

Poisoner

Paying for a peerage - an illegal practice - feels like a very modern form of corruption, one that both the Labour and Conservative parties have been happy to indulge in at times during the early twenty-first century. Except, of course, it was happening almost a century ago.Meet Maundy Gregory, actor, journalist, publishing proprietor, conman, embezzler, MI5 spy - and the man you went to see if you had the money to pay for a peerage in the post-First World War years.Cutting a dash across high society of the 1920s - he was in attendance at the wedding of the future George VI - the immaculately oiled and overdressed Gregory would happily pockets thousands for playing Mr Fixit for wannabe knights and lords, and swell the coffers of Lloyd George's Liberal Party to millions of pounds.Business was brisk, and business was brazen. Visitors to his lavish office on Parliament Street, with a direct line to 'Number 10', would be wined and dined and, after paying up, leave satisfied that they would be next on the list for a knighthood or barony. Nothing could be guaranteed, of course, and it was a strictly no refunds business.But Gregory was also suspected of being something else, to add to his impressive list of accomplishments: a murderer. As the political winds changed, the debts mounted up and the walls closed in around him, he somehow managed to inherit his mistress's not inconsiderable savings when she scribbled a new will on the back of a menu and was suddenly taken ill ...In The Man Who Sold Honours, Stephen Bates lifts the lid on the truth about this long-forgotten character who remains the only person ever to be successfully prosecuted under the sale of honours act of 1925. A powerful preview of the scandals to come in Britain in recent years, this is the story of the original honours tout - a riches-to-rags tale of greed, corruption and murder in the interwar years.

Tent Poles in the ground is a collection of twenty-one texts by Stephen Bates. Like Papers (2001), Papers 2 (2007) and Papers 3 (2016), which were written in collaboration with Jonathan Sergison, co-founder of Sergison Bates architects, 'Tent Poles' testifies to the importance of writing as part of a form of practice that includes building and teaching. The reflections included are part of the process of developing and testing ideas in Sergison Bates’s London studio and in Stephen Bates’s teaching studio at the Chair of Urbanism and Housing, TU München. Covering a range of themes, from domesticity to the city, landscape and the design process, they record both the fundamental principles that inform his approach to architecture and the shifts in thinking that have come about in 30 years of practice. While these are personal reflections on buildings and spaces, they were inspired by discussions across the table in the London studio, with teaching colleagues and students in Munich, and meetings with interesting people from different creative disciplines. Like the making of buildings, thinking and writing about them, too, is always the result of a process of collaboration.

The long lasting and extremely expensive dispute between Christ Church College Oxford and its Dean (Head of College) has become a cause célèbre which spilled over into the outside world - not just into academic life, but Church and charitable establishments as well. After the settlement of the legal dispute, there are still far too many loose ends in this painful saga. Award-winning former Guardian journalist, Stephen Bates has set out to tell the true story of this episode in a way that is dispassionate and objective. The result is a book that reads like a detective story and moves beyond the obscurity and the venom which surrounds this sad tale into a clearer vision of what went wrong and why the episode must never happen again.

Black-box machine learning models are now routinely used in high-risk settings, like medical diagnostics, which demand uncertainty quantification to avoid consequential model failures. Conformal prediction is a user-friendly paradigm for creating statistically rigorous uncertainty sets/intervals for the predictions of such models. One can use conformal prediction with any pre-trained model, such as a neural network, to produce sets that are guaranteed to contain the ground truth with a user-specified probability, such as 90%. It is easy-to-understand, easy-to-use, and in general, applies naturally to problems arising in the fields of computer vision, natural language processing, deep reinforcement learning, amongst others.In this hands-on introduction the authors provide the reader with a working understanding of conformal prediction and related distribution-free uncertainty quantification techniques. They lead the reader through practical theory and examples of conformal prediction and describe its extensions to complex machine learning tasks involving structured outputs, distribution shift, time-series, outliers, models that abstain, and more. Throughout, there are many explanatory illustrations, examples, and code samples in Python. With each code sample comes a Jupyter notebook implementing the method on a real-data example.This hands-on tutorial, full of practical and accessible examples, is essential reading for all students, practitioners and researchers working on all types of systems deploying machine learning techniques.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION'METICULOUSLY RESEARCHED ... A GLORIOUSLY ENGAGING ROMP' JANICE HALLETT, THE SUNDAY TIMES'IMMERSIVE AND COMPELLING' DAVID KYNASTON'A PAGE-TURNER' ROBERT LACEYA brilliant narrative investigation into the 1920s case that inspired Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham.On a bleak Tuesday morning in February 1921, 48-year-old Katharine Armstrong died in her bedroom on the first floor of an imposing Edwardian villa overlooking the rolling hills of the isolated borderlands between Wales and England.Within fifteen months of such a sad domestic tragedy, her husband, Herbert Rowse Armstrong, would be arrested, tried and hanged for poisoning her with arsenic, the only solicitor ever to be executed in England.Armstrong's story was retold again and again, decade after decade, in a thousand newspaper articles across the world, and may have also inspired the new breed of popular detective writers seeking to create a cunning criminal at the centre of their thrillers.With all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, the case is a near-perfect whodunnit. But who, in fact, did it? Was Armstrong really a murderer?One hundred years after the execution, Agatha-Award shortlisted Stephen Bates examines and retells the story of the case, evoking the period and atmosphere of the early 1920s, and questioning the fatal judgement.'CAREFUL AND COMPELLING' KATE MORGAN'YOU WILL READ IT IN ONE SITTING' MARC MULHOLLAND'A REAL-LIFE GOLDEN-AGE CRIME NOVEL' SEAN O'CONNOR

Amidst the turbulence and invasions, upheaval and dissent that characterise British history, one thing has remained remarkably stable. Although there are other monarchies, Britain's Crown stands out due to the continuity of its traditions, and its ability to adapt... In this sprightly commentary on the Crown's 1,800-year-long story, Stephen Bates provides a dazzling insight into Royal custom and ritual, whilst depicting the individuals behind the myth with compassion and wit. And as our ageing Queen prepares to pass the baton, he asks us all to consider: could we ever do without the Crown?

Rincon Point is renowned as the Queen of the Coast, one of the premier surfing spots in the world, but that is only a fragment of its rich history. Before the arrival of Europeans, it was a Chumash village called Shuku. In the 19th century, it was part of Rancho El Rincon, whose owners included a rich but illiterate Californio rancher, an English physician who made house calls by bicycle, and a Chilean pharmacist who dispensed drugs out of an old ship's cabin. It was the site of a scandalous love-triangle murder in the 1870s, a rickety highway on stilts in the 1910s, and a raunchy honky-tonk in the 1920s. Banditos, nudists, movie stars, long-boarders--they have all shaped Rincon Point, a place immortalized by novelists, poets, painters, photographers, and the Beach Boys.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION'METICULOUSLY RESEARCHED ... A GLORIOUSLY ENGAGING ROMP' JANICE HALLETT, THE SUNDAY TIMES'IMMERSIVE AND COMPELLING' DAVID KYNASTON'A PAGE-TURNER' ROBERT LACEY'CAREFUL AND COMPELLING' KATE MORGAN'YOU WILL READ IT IN ONE SITTING' MARC MULHOLLAND'A REAL-LIFE GOLDEN-AGE CRIME NOVEL' SEAN O'CONNORA brilliant narrative investigation into the 1920s case that inspired Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham.On a bleak Tuesday morning in February 1921, 48-year-old Katharine Armstrong died in her bedroom on the first floor of an imposing Edwardian villa overlooking the rolling hills of the isolated borderlands between Wales and England.Within fifteen months of such a sad domestic tragedy, her husband, Herbert Rowse Armstrong, would be arrested, tried and hanged for poisoning her with arsenic, the only solicitor ever to be executed in England.Armstrong's story was retold again and again, decade after decade, in a thousand newspaper articles across the world, and may have also inspired the new breed of popular detective writers seeking to create a cunning criminal at the centre of their thrillers.With all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, the case is a near-perfect whodunnit. But who, in fact, did it? Was Armstrong really a murderer?One hundred years after the execution, Agatha-Award shortlisted Stephen Bates examines and retells the story of the case, evoking the period and atmosphere of the early 1920s, and questioning the fatal judgement.

Following Papers and Papers 2, the third volume in the series contains papers written by Jonathan Sergison and Stephen Bates between 2008 and 2014. Illustrated with photographs and drawings, the papers focus on some of the themes that are at the heart of the work of Sergison Bates architects and their approach to architectural practice, such as domesticity, typology and density.

The greatest villain who ever stood trial at the Old Bailey, as Charles Dickens described him William Palmer was convicted in 1856 of murdering his best friend, but was suspected of poisoning more than a dozen other people, including his wife and children. He was a new kind of murderer respectable, middle class, and consequently more terrifying, Britain s most infamous figure until Jack the Ripper. The Poisoner takes the reader into the very psyche of a killer

A set of antique photographic plates is the key to uncovering hidden truths of the Civil War, Great Depression, and 9/11 eras in this “unflinching” novel (Publishers Weekly). A teenage boy and his grandfather travel across America to attend that last great reunion of Civil War veterans at Gettysburg in 1938, where secrets and lies are revealed about the old man’s past. Perhaps he was not the hero his grandson thought, but he still has a valuable treasure to reveal, which will shed intriguing light on the war and his part in it. Interweaving three periods of crisis in American history—the Civil War, the Depression, and 9/11—The Photographer’s Boy explores the power of photography and journalism to inform or mislead; raises questions about love; and offers “an unflinching but sympathetic, often touching, look at the comforting fictions people wrap themselves in to protect themselves from the cold of reality” (Publishers Weekly).

Right-wing evangelical Christianity has come to dominate American political and social life in recent years, dividing the country and sparking cultural and moral battles. High politics and low tactics frame a fierce debate which goes much further back in the country's history than the accession of George W. Bush in 2001. It's a battle that sears America's soul and affects the world. In this book Stephen Bates explains why what happens in the Bible Belt matters to us and how there are those who hope to export the battle to Britain.American fundamentalist religion has the potential to impact on crucial and acutely dangerous areas of the world. Its priorities are often arcane and sometimes weird. But it is already affecting American government policy at home and abroad: not least in Israel and the Middle East. How is religion affecting the current presidential elections and where will America's battle for its soul take the world next?

Asquith's administration laid the foundation of Britain's welfare state, but he was plunged into a major power struggle with the House of Lords. The budget of 1909 was vetoed by the hereditary upper chamber, and in 1910 Asquith called and won two elections on this constitutional issue. The Lords eventually passed the 1911 Parliament Act, ending their veto of financial legislation. Asquith was Prime Minister on the outbreak of World War I, but his government fell in 1916 as a result of the 'Shells Scandal'.