Extremes

This is a collection of tales about the extremes of human behaviour which surveys 500 years of history and which alights on events in which people have yielded to passion, to a compulsion out of all proportion to the situation. Religious mania, cannibalism, anorexia, castration, parthenogenesis and heresy are some of Dunning's subjects; his characters include Joan of Arc, Gustav Mahler, Sigmund Freud, the Virgin Mary, Charlotte Corday, Pope Innocent III, Adolf Hitler and Louis Braille. All of the tales show how unnatural human nature can be.