SWEENEY TODD - Tapa blanda

'Sweeney Todd will never die. We all need bogeymen and he was bogier than most.' - Anna Pavord, the Observer, 29 January 1979. Sweeney Todd, the notorious Demon Barber, has been called 'the greatest mass murderer in English history'. With the aid of an ingenious revolving chair and a cut-throat razor, he is said to have robbed and butchered over 160 victims in his Fleet Street barber shop before taking their remains to nearby Bell Yard, where his accomplice, Margery Lovett, cooked their flesh for meat pies. Separating fact from fiction, Peter Haining reveals a gruesome and bizarre story with a unique criminal at its heart. It will certainly give pie-lovers food for thought.

Peter Haining first came across the Sweeney Todd story in his early career as a Fleet Street journalist. He went on to write the first definitive bibliography of the man. Now a full-time writer, he has recently contributed a new entry - Sweeney Todd - to the Dictionary of National Biography (published by OUP in 2003). He is the author of The Jail That Went to Sea, also published by Robson.