First edition, first impression, signed limited issue, number 8 of 100 copies signed by the author. With the very scarce dust jacket. In Excelsis is Lord Alfred Douglas's sonnet sequence written while imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs Prison for libelling Winston Churchill. Douglas had accused Churchill of being party to a Jewish conspiracy to rig the stock market by falsely reporting defeat in the Battle of Jutland - the same old story as is told of the Rothschilds after the Battle of Waterloo. In spite of this somewhat unpropitious reason for his being there, Douglas claimed to have profited from his six months incarceration, not least in discovering "the theology ... of the Catholic Mystics", which he explores in the poems. The affirmative title is of course a deliberate inversion of his erstwhile lover Oscar Wilde's production from jail, De Profundis.
The post In Excelsis. appeared first on Peter Harrington.