Bertolini's restaurant was cheap, but charming: perfect for the creatures who roamed 19th-century London after the sun went down. On Tuesday nights, in Bertolini's backroom, respected judges and doctors, esteemed lawyers, admired politicians and award-winning poets and writers drank heavily, smoked cigars and secretly discussed what they thought they knew of the British colonies, more specifically polygamy, bestiality, phallic worship, female circumcision, ritual murder, savage fetishes and island cannibalism. The gentlemen would trade in exotic pornography and tales of flogging and prostitution. If, by chance, a pious, God-fearing bloke were to accidentally stumble into the Fleet Street backroom on a Tuesday night, the tips of his Victorian moustache would've certainly stood on end.

Before the debate between science and creationism, there was the debate between monogenism and polygenism. Monogenists believed that all of humanity shared a common ancestry while polygenists were convinced that different races of man had different origins. There was a palpable tension in Victorian England between the creation of a democratic scientific methodology and the elitist attitudes that reinforced Anglo-Saxon superiority. During Britain's "Imperial Century" these convenient human classifications were perfectly inline with colonialist sensibilities—of course, no race could match the enlightenment of the English Gentleman. The conflict captured the imagination of Victorian England and, by 1863, drove a wedge between the polygenist and monogenist members of the then 20-year-old Ethnological Society of London. 

Determined to continue advocating their polygenist ideologies, Captain Richard Francis Burton and Dr. James Hunt, both members of the Ethnological Society of London, broke away and established The Anthropological Society of London. The new splinter society supported the pseudoscientific practices of phrenology, the measuring of skull size with craniometers and, of course, polygenism. Recent scholarship has even suggested that its members were covert propagandists, acting on behalf of the Confederate States of America to convince Londoners that enslaved Africans were biologically incapable of any development beyond their menial work as slaves.(...)

July 17, 1959

Billie Holiday was in a bad way when admitted to Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem in late May, 1959: exhausted, puffy, her breathing laboured, her liver shot from decades of alcohol and drug abuse. And the famous voice, the one that had indelibly stamped God Bless the Child, Strange Fruit and You’ve Changed, was more croak than satiny purr. Adding insult to bodily injury, police had discovered heroin at her apartment, resulting in the former Eleanora Fagan’s arrest in hospital for narcotics possession. At the New York hospital, a police officer took up residence outside her room, and there he stayed until a few hours before cirrhosis of the liver and pulmonary edema took Lady Day into that good night. She was 44, with just 70 cents in her bank account.