This week's theme is fraudsters and frauds - from the relatively benign to the decidedly mercenary.
General "Sir" Gregor MacGregor, Prince of the Principality of Poyais, arrived in London in 1820, after many years adventuring and soldiering in South America, to invite his fellow Britons to invest in the wonderful and fertile new country of Poyais.
One day in April 1817, a cobbler in Almondsbury in Gloucestershire met an apparently disoriented young woman wearing exotic clothes who was speaking an incomprehensible language. This was the beginning of the story of the mysterious Princess Caraboo.
In 1912, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed to have discovered the 'missing link' between ape and man. But 'the Piltdown Man' was a paleoanthropological fraud, in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human, though it took another 40 years to finally disprove the claim.
Patricia Preece was the second wife of painter Stanley Spencer, an English artist, fraud and social climber.
'Grey Owl' was an Englishman, who created a new life for himself as a prominent Native American writer and conservationist in Canada in the 1930s. Upon his death, it was discovered that he was, in fact, from Hastings in East Sussex, and had concealed his true identity for many years.
Oscar Merril Hartzell (1876–1943) was an American con man who convinced many people in North America to join him in a fraudulent lawsuit against the British government for a share of Sir Francis Drake's alleged fortune.
