JACK THE RIPPER
The identity of "Jack the Ripper", the mysterious serial killer who murdered and mutilated five prostitutes in Whitechapel, in London's East End, in 1888, is a remarkable example of amateur endeavour. Since 1990, 39 books have appeared on the case - yet no one has solved it.
A society, the "Cloak and Dagger Club", holds regular meetings in the East End, attended by dozens of amateur historians. Cockneys with no higher education debate the Ripper case with an erudition that would shame most seminars at the Institute of Historical Research.
Modern theories as to the identity of "Jack the Ripper" began with the discovery of the "MacNaghten Memorandum" in 1959, a document written around 1904 by Sir Melville MacNaghten, the deputy chief commissioner of Scotland Yard.
MacNaghten named the three men he regarded as the most likely suspects: Montague Druitt, a 31-year-old barrister who committed suicide less than a month after the last Ripper murder, "Kosminski, a Polish Jew" of Whitechapel, and Michael Ostrog, "a Russian doctor".
Two other solutions to the Ripper mystery stand out. In the early 1970s, a number of books linked the Royal Family and the Freemasons with the crimes. In particular, Prince Albert Edward, Duke of Clarence, the eldest son of the Prince of Wales (Edward VII) has been repeatedly named as being closely involved in the murders, which were apparently carried out by Sir William Gull, the Royal Physician - possibly with the help of a group of Freemasons.
In 1992 a "Diary of Jack the Ripper" turned up in Liverpool. It was written by James Maybrick (1838-89), a cotton broker who had never been connected with the Ripper crimes and who died of poisoning in May 1889.
The discovery of the "diary" 104 years after the murders was greeted with suspicion. Yet all attempts to prove it a fake have failed.
I am more than 90 per cent convinced and have new evidence that Maybrick was the Ripper. If the diary is genuine, he murdered the prostitutes to secure vicarious revenge against his wife, who was having one or more affairs at the time of the killings.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The identity of the author of Shakespeare's plays is probably the best-known field in which unofficial historians have been active. That the man who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and died there in 1616 was intellectually incapable of having written the greatest body of works in world literature is a theory that dates from the late 18th century.
Between about 1870 and 1914 finding the actual author of the plays became a fad among intellectually-minded men and women of letters. In the past half century, with the rise of academic departments of literature, the "authorship of Shakespeare" question has been confined to the fringes of amateur endeavour. Yet it appears as popular as ever, with book after book, often self-produced, naming the real author of Shakespeare's works.
Doubts about the authorship of the plays derive from the almost incredible gap between the meagreness of the background of William Shakespeare of Stratford and the magnitude of his achievement. Shakespeare grew up in a village of 1,300 people where probably two-thirds of the adults (including Shakespeare's parents) were illiterate, a fact glossed over in most biographies.
Yet, as things stand, not one of the well-known candidates for authorship - Sir Francis Bacon, the earl of Oxford, the earl of Rutland, and Christopher Marlowe - is actually convincing (Oxford died in 1604, nine years before the appearance of Shakespeare's final play).
Nor can amateur historians ever quite decide whether the actual identity of the author of the plays was known at the time, or was a secret, revealed through the plays possibly by way of a code. Nevertheless, there is certainly a well-nigh incredible gap between the man Shakespeare of Stratford, and Shakespeare the author, which is glossed over by academics.
Personally I think Shakespeare the man was indeed Shakespeare the playwright, particularly in the light of the one discovery that has been made about Shakespeare since the first world war - that he worked in two noble households in Lancashire for two years, probably as tutor to the children.
JOHN F. KENNEDY The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 is the prime example of a recent historical event that has engendered an avalanche of amateur speculation. It is easy to see why.
Kennedy was allegedly assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old loner whose career up to that point marked him out as surely one of the strangest young men in the United States. Oswald joined the US Marines, while under age, for three years. Yet he was also a Marxist who lived for two years in the Soviet Union and married a Russian.
He returned to America in early 1963 and drifted into a series of dead-end jobs in Dallas, Texas, at the same time as he headed a pro-Castro group in New Orleans. Over the years, it has seemed to many to be inconceivable, given Oswald's background at the height of the cold war, that he could not have been acting as part of some wider conspiracy.
Oswald was shot dead two days after the assassination by another mysterious loner, Jack Ruby, a middle-aged Dallas nightclub owner alleged to have Mafia links. Ruby was convicted of Oswald's murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Immediately after JFK's assassination, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, established a panel to investigate, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren. It concluded that there was no conspiracy but that Oswald and Ruby had acted alone.
Within a year or two of the publication of the Warren report, the first books criticising its findings appeared. Virtually all of these argue that Oswald and Ruby were part of a wider conspiracy.
The critics, however, fail to agree about the nature of this conspiracy, with the CIA, the FBI, anti-Castro Cubans and the Mafia among the suspects.
My own view is that there was no conspiracy: Oswald and Ruby acted alone, and it is easy to prove that they did. I am attracted to a theory mentioned in the Warren report but virtually ignored ever since, that Oswald's real target was not Kennedy but Texas governor John Connally, who was sitting just in front of Kennedy in the presidential limousine and was seriously wounded by Oswald. There is much circumstantial evidence that Connally was Oswald's real target - when Marina Oswald first heard about the assassination, she thought that her husband had killed Connally, not Kennedy. If Connally was the actual target, there was, of course, no conspiracy.
But the most striking fact about JFK's assassination is that no academic historian has ever written about it.