Who Lies Where: a Guide to Famous Graves (A Guardian book)

by Michael Kerrigan (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.29

  A tour of the dominions of the dead: the final resting places of the great and the good, the notorious and the downright nasty throughout the British Isles. As well as taking the reader through well-known sights such as the Glasgow Necropolis, St Paul's Cathedral in London, and Highgate Cemetery (where Karl Marx, George Elliot, Ralph Richardson and Christina Rosetti are buried) this book also visits places known mostly by association with one person: East Coker in Somerset, where T.S. Eliot is buried, or Cholsey in Oxfordshire, last resting place of Agatha Christie. The guide also contains information on the history of burial practices: the resurrectionists, plague pits, the use of quicklime to dissolve unwanted bodies, and promiscuous burial plots where so many people were interred together that the level of the ground rose - with disturbing consequences when heavy rain washed the topsoil away.