Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found - Tapa dura

'Once again Frances Larson has crafted a uniquely fascinating and superlatively eloquent book on a disturbing but captivating subject. With a skilful blend of wit, insight and empathy, Larson explores the dark and largely uncharted world of severed heads to provide this powerful and illuminating book. Larson's engrossing account of the fraught business of head-hunting takes our lazy notions of civilised society's superiority over so-called primitive cultures and - so to speak - turns them on their head' --Wendy Moore, author of Wedlock and The Knife Man

'A fabulously quirky and gorily entertaining account of the dark and varied obsession that the 'civilised West' has had with decapitated heads and skulls. Larson takes us on a riveting tour of heads severed, shrunken, deposed, framed and dissected, from Oliver Cromwell's mummified bonce to Damien Hirst's platinum skull set with diamonds' --'Editor's Pick', Bookseller

'A completely original and compelling book: the unnatural history of severed heads. Heads as prizes, heads as art, heads as objects of instruction, heads as symbols of triumph over enemies. Frances Larson has written a unique history worthy of the great Roy Porter' --Richard Fortey, author of The Hidden Landscape and Life: An Unauthorised Biography

'Strangely compelling' --Big Issue in the North

'Engaging and readable... Severed is a fascinating curio of a history' --The Times

'An elegant history... Larson surveys the severed head in art, medicine, religion and criminology; her book is packed with bizarre and horrifying stories, fascinating facts and philosophical conundrums' --Independent on Sunday

'Fascinating' --'Must Reads', Sunday Times

'Severed offers a scholarly, grimly amusing and possibly definitive survey of an often disquieting subject' --Spectator

'Larson is a fine and careful writer. She is alive to the delicacy of the language needed, all the more appropriately given that much of what she describes is fascinatingly gruesome' --Evening Standard

'Elegantly argued and grimly compelling' ***** --Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Daily Telegraph

'Larson's compelling and anecdotal study explores the grim fascination of severed heads' ***** --Sunday Telegraph

'Fascinating' --Literary Review

'Larson's compelling and anecdotal study explores the grim fascination of severed heads' ***** --Sunday Telegraph

'An eloquent and provocative exploration of what the detached head means, one that reaches beyond today's desert atrocities into the core of human culture' --New Statesman

'A compelling historical narrative... Larson tells a very human account of an inhumane act' --Observer

'Larson writes in the style of a flaneur. A connoisseur of severed heads from days spent in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford she wanders among the skulls with assurance and not a hint of a shiver, alighting on those that most interest her and arranging them in themes. The book is more of a clever, sometimes playful, conversation than a conventional study' -- Independent

'A timely, disquieting, deeply thought-provoking and sometimes darkly funny history of decapitation' -- Book of the year, -- Times Higher Education

'This engagingly quirky book explores the curious history of humanity's fascination with severed heads. Gruesome but fascinating' --Mail on Sunday

'Larson is a subtle reader of the meanings of such heads and skulls that both repel and fascinate us' -- Guardian
'A timely, disquieting, deeply thought-provoking and sometimes darkly funny history of decapitation' --Book of the year, Times Higher Education

The human head is exceptional. It accommodates four of our five senses, encases the brain and boasts the most expressive set of muscles in the body. It is our most distinctive attribute and it connects our inner selves to the outer world more evocatively than any other part of the body. Yet there is a dark side to the head's pre-eminence. Over the centuries, human heads have decorated our churches, festooned our city walls and filled our museums. Long regarded as objects of fascination and repulsion, they have been props for artists and specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of barter. Today, as videos of decapitations circulate online and scientists promise the wealthy among us that our heads may one day live on without our bodies, the severed head is as contentious and compelling as ever. From the western colonialists whose demand for shrunken heads spurred brutal massacres to the troops in the Second World War who sent the remains of Japanese soldiers home to their girlfriends; from the memento mori in Romantic portraits to Damien Hirst's With Dead Head; from grave-robbing phrenologists to enterprising cryonicists, Larson explores the bizarre, often gruesome and confounding history of the severed head. Its story is our story.