All through the summer of 1874, "The Times" devoted an entire page everyday to the great Tichborne trial, the longest-running and most mesmerizing legal trial of the 19th century. This work explores the story of the man at the centre of it all they called the Tichborne Claimant. He called himself Sir Roger Tichborne, long-lost heir to a baronetcy and vast estates in Hampshire, a man who had disappeared at sea in 1854, apparently emerging from the Australian bush 12 years later - ten stone heavier, a butcher by profession and having forgotten how to speak his native French. Yet not even Roger's mother could tell them apart. After all, a man might change his shape in a dozen years, but could this uncouth colonial really be Sir Roger? That question would take a full year in court, inquiries across three continents, and more than a million pages of evidence to settle. The affair of the Tichborne claimant resonates across a century and a half with questions - of identity, loss and the nature of truth - that remain piercingly relevant, even in 2003.
