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Book The Restless Republic  Britain without a Crown

Download or read book The Restless Republic Britain without a Crown written by Anna Keay and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2022-03-03 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 WINNER OF THE POL ROGER DUFF COOPER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE Eleven years when Britain had no king.

Book Fatal Path

    Book Details:
  • Author : Ronan Fanning
  • Publisher : Faber & Faber
  • Release : 2013-04-30
  • ISBN : 0571297412
  • Pages : 325 pages

Download or read book Fatal Path written by Ronan Fanning and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a magisterial narrative of the most turbulent decade in Anglo-Irish history: a decade of unleashed passions that came close to destroying the parliamentary system and to causing civil war in the United Kingdom. It was also the decade of the cataclysmic Great War, of an officers' mutiny in an elite cavalry regiment of the British Army and of Irish armed rebellion. It was a time, argues Ronan Fanning, when violence and the threat of violence trumped democratic politics. This is a contentious view. Historians have wished to see the events of that decade as an aberration, as an eruption of irrational bloodletting. And they have have been reluctant to write about the triumph of physical force. Fanning argues that in fact violence worked, however much this offends our contemporary moral instincts. Without resistance from the Ulster Unionists and its very real threat of violence the state of Northern Ireland would never have come into being. The Home Rule party of constitutionalist nationalists failed, and were pushed aside by the revolutionary nationalists Sinn Fein. Bleakly realistic, ruthlessly analytical of the vacillation and indecision displayed by democratic politicians at Westminster faced with such revolutionary intransigence, Fatal Path is history as it was, not as we would wish it to be.

Book The Crown Jewels

Download or read book The Crown Jewels written by Anna Keay and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text captures the magnificence of a collection of symbolic objects steeped in English history like no other: the crown jewels.

Book The Last Royal Rebel

    Book Details:
  • Author : Anna Keay
  • Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
  • Release : 2016-05-19
  • ISBN : 140884608X
  • Pages : 481 pages

Download or read book The Last Royal Rebel written by Anna Keay and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A superb biography, which paints a vivid picture of the times and of her subject' Daily Telegraph 'Fascinating, compelling, outrageous and ultimately tragic' Simon Sebag Montefiore 'It is the best royal biography I have read in years' A.N. Wilson From the Duff Cooper Prize-winning author of The Restless Republic, a remarkable biography of one of the most intriguing figures of the Restoration era. James, Duke of Monmouth, the favoured illegitimate son of Charles II, was born in exile the year his grandfather Charles I was executed and the English monarchy abolished. Abducted from his mother on his father's orders, he emerged from a childhood in the backstreets of Rotterdam to command the ballrooms of Paris, the brothels of Covent Garden and the battlefields of Flanders. Such was his appeal that when the monarchy itself came under threat, the cry was for Monmouth to succeed Charles II as king. He inspired both delight and disgust, adulation and abhorrence and, in time, love and loyalty. Louis XIV was his mentor, Nell Gwyn his protector, D'Artagnan his lieutenant, William of Orange his confidant, John Dryden his censor and John Locke his comrade. In The Last Royal Rebel, Anna Keay matches rigorous scholarship with a storyteller's gift to enrapturing effect. She paints a vivid portrait of the warm, courageous and handsome Duke of Monmouth, a man who by his own admission 'lived a very dissolute and irregular life', but who was ultimately prepared to risk everything for honour and justice. His story, culminating in his fateful invasion, provides a sweeping chronicle of the turbulent decades in which England as we know it was forged.

Book The Northumbrians

    Book Details:
  • Author : Dan Jackson
  • Publisher : Hurst & Company
  • Release : 2019
  • ISBN : 1787381943
  • Pages : 323 pages

Download or read book The Northumbrians written by Dan Jackson and published by Hurst & Company. This book was released on 2019 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is the North East the most distinctive region of England? Where do the stereotypes about North Easterners come from, and why are they so often misunderstood? In this wideranging new history of the people of North East England, Dan Jackson explores the deep roots of Northumbrian culture--hard work and heavy drinking, sociability and sentimentality, militarism and masculinity--in centuries of border warfare and dangerous and demanding work in industry, at sea and underground. He explains how the landscape and architecture of the North East explains so much about the people who have lived there, and how a 'Northumbrian Enlightenment' emerged from this most literate part of England, leading to a catalogue of inventions that changed the world, from the locomotive to the lightbulb. Jackson's Northumbrian journey reaches right to the present day, as this remarkable region finds itself caught between an indifferent south and a newly assertive Scotland. Covering everything from the Venerable Bede and the prince-bishops of Durham to Viz and Geordie Shore, this vital new history makes sense of a part of England facing an uncertain future, but whose people remain as distinctive as ever.

Book The History of Myddle

    Book Details:
  • Author : Richard Gough
  • Publisher : Penguin Classics
  • Release : 1988
  • ISBN : 9780140433142
  • Pages : 334 pages

Download or read book The History of Myddle written by Richard Gough and published by Penguin Classics. This book was released on 1988 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Before the Crown

    Book Details:
  • Author : Flora Harding
  • Publisher : HarperCollins UK
  • Release : 2020-09-17
  • ISBN : 0008387532
  • Pages : 400 pages

Download or read book Before the Crown written by Flora Harding and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the crown there was a love story...

Book The Personal Rule of Charles I

Download or read book The Personal Rule of Charles I written by Kevin Sharpe and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-10 with total page 1012 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This authoritative reevaluation of Charles' personal rule yields new insights into his character, reign, politics, religion, foreign policy and finance. In doing so, the book offers a vivid new perspective on the origins of the English Civil War.

Book The Myth of Pope Joan

Download or read book The Myth of Pope Joan written by Alain Boureau and published by . This book was released on 2001-05 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the ninth century, a brilliant young woman named Joan disguised herself as a man so that she could follow her lover into the then-exclusively male world of scholarship. She proved so successful that she ascended the Catholic hierarchy in Rome and was eventually elected pope. Her pontificate lasted two years, until she became pregnant and died after giving birth during a public procession from the Vatican. Or so the legend goes—a legend that was fabricated sometime in the thirteenth century, according to Alain Boureau, and which has persisted in one form or another down to the present day. In this fascinating saga of belief and rhetoric, politics and religion, Boureau investigates the historical and ecclesiastical circumstances under which the myth of Pope Joan was constructed and the different uses to which it was put over the centuries. He shows, for instance, how Catholic clerics justified the exclusion of women from the papacy and the priesthood by employing the myth in misogynist moral tales, only to find the popess they had created turned against them in anti-Catholic propaganda during the Reformation.

Book Tales From the Long Twelfth Century

Download or read book Tales From the Long Twelfth Century written by Richard Huscroft and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This intriguing book tells the story of England’s great medieval Angevin dynasty in an entirely new way. Departing from the usual king-centric narrative, Richard Huscroft instead centers each of his chapters on the experiences of a particular man or woman who contributed to the broad sweep of events. Whether noble and brave or flawed and fallible, each participant was struggling to survive in the face of uncontrollable forces. Princes, princesses, priests, heroes, relatives, friends, and others—some well known and others obscure—all were embroiled in the drama of historic events. Under Henry II and his sons Richard I (the Lionheart) and John, the empire rose to encompass much of the British Isles and the greater part of modern France, yet it survived a mere fifty years. Huscroft deftly weaves together the stories of individual lives to illuminate the key themes of this exciting and formative era.

Book A Little History of the World

Download or read book A Little History of the World written by E. H. Gombrich and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: E. H. Gombrich's Little History of the World, though written in 1935, has become one of the treasures of historical writing since its first publication in English in 2005. The Yale edition alone has now sold over half a million copies, and the book is available worldwide in almost thirty languages. Gombrich was of course the best-known art historian of his time, and his text suggests illustrations on every page. This illustrated edition of the Little History brings together the pellucid humanity of his narrative with the images that may well have been in his mind's eye as he wrote the book. The two hundred illustrations—most of them in full color—are not simple embellishments, though they are beautiful. They emerge from the text, enrich the author's intention, and deepen the pleasure of reading this remarkable work. For this edition the text is reset in a spacious format, flowing around illustrations that range from paintings to line drawings, emblems, motifs, and symbols. The book incorporates freshly drawn maps, a revised preface, and a new index. Blending high-grade design, fine paper, and classic binding, this is both a sumptuous gift book and an enhanced edition of a timeless account of human history.

Book On Settling

    Book Details:
  • Author : Robert E. Goodin
  • Publisher : Princeton University Press
  • Release : 2012
  • ISBN : 0691148457
  • Pages : 126 pages

Download or read book On Settling written by Robert E. Goodin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hidden value of settling In a culture that worships ceaseless striving, "settling" seems like giving up. But is it? On Settling defends the positive value of settling, explaining why this disdained practice is not only more realistic but more useful than an excessive ideal of striving. In fact, the book makes the case that we'd all be lost without settling--and that even to strive, one must first settle. We may admire strivers and love the ideal of striving, but who of us could get through a day without settling? Real people, confronted with a complex problem, simply make do, settling for some resolution that, while almost certainly not the best that one could find by devoting limitless time and attention to the problem, is nonetheless good enough. Robert Goodin explores the dynamics of this process. These involve taking as fixed, for now, things that we reserve the right to reopen later (nothing is fixed for good, although events might always overtake us). We settle on some things in order to concentrate better on others. At the same time we realize we may need to come back later and reconsider those decisions. From settling on and settling for, to settling down and settling in, On Settling explains why settling is useful for planning, creating trust, and strengthening the social fabric--and why settling is different from compromise and resignation. So, the next time you're faced with a thorny problem, just settle. It's no failure.

Book A Distant Mirror

    Book Details:
  • Author : Barbara W. Tuchman
  • Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
  • Release : 1987-07-12
  • ISBN : 0345349571
  • Pages : 738 pages

Download or read book A Distant Mirror written by Barbara W. Tuchman and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 1987-07-12 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “marvelous history”* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years’ War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August *Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.” Praise for A Distant Mirror “Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.”—The New York Review of Books “A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.”—The Wall Street Journal “Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.”—Commentary

Book A Book of Golden Deeds of All Times and All Lands

Download or read book A Book of Golden Deeds of All Times and All Lands written by Charlotte Mary Yonge and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Providence Lost

    Book Details:
  • Author : Paul Lay
  • Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
  • Release : 2020-01-09
  • ISBN : 178185257X
  • Pages : 336 pages

Download or read book Providence Lost written by Paul Lay and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-09 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A compelling and wry narrative of one of the most intellectually thrilling eras of British history' Guardian. ***************** SHORTLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2020 England, 1651. Oliver Cromwell has defeated his royalist opponents in two civil wars, executed the Stuart king Charles I, laid waste to Ireland, and crushed the late king's son and his Scottish allies. He is master of Britain and Ireland. But Parliament, divided between moderates, republicans and Puritans of uncompromisingly millenarian hue, is faction-ridden and disputatious. By the end of 1653, Cromwell has become 'Lord Protector'. Seeking dragons for an elect Protestant nation to slay, he launches an ambitious 'Western Design' against Spain's empire in the New World. When an amphibious assault on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in 1655 proves a disaster, a shaken Cromwell is convinced that God is punishing England for its sinfulness. But the imposition of the rule of the Major-Generals – bureaucrats with a penchant for closing alehouses – backfires spectacularly. Sectarianism and fundamentalism run riot. Radicals and royalists join together in conspiracy. The only way out seems to be a return to a Parliament presided over by a king. But will Cromwell accept the crown? Paul Lay narrates in entertaining but always rigorous fashion the story of England's first and only experiment with republican government: he brings the febrile world of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate to life, providing vivid portraits of the extraordinary individuals who inhabited it and capturing its dissonant cacophony of political and religious voices. ***************** Reviews: 'Briskly paced and elegantly written, Providence Lost provides us with a first-class ticket to this Cromwellian world of achievement, paradox and contradiction. Few guides take us so directly, or so sympathetically, into the imaginative worlds of that tumultuous decade' John Adamson, The Times. 'Providence Lost is a learned, lucid, wry and compelling narrative of the 1650s as well as a sensitive portrayal of a man unravelled by providence' Jessie Childs, Guardian.

Book Interregnum  the People s Republic of Britain

Download or read book Interregnum the People s Republic of Britain written by Anna Keay and published by . This book was released on 2021-08-04 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1649. King Charles I had been executed. A quarter of a million had died in the Second English Civil War. Two hundred great houses stood in ruins, with hundreds of villages and towns left battered and broken. The monarchy, the House of Lords and the Church of England were all abruptly abolished. What next? This is the story of 1649 to 1660, the eleven years when England, Wales and later Scotland and Ireland were governed as a republic. In the midst of unprecedented tumult, what was life like for the people of England - both the winners and the losers? Historian Anna Keay explores the decade through the lives of nine people, from Oliver Cromwell, upon whose personality the entire fate of England was said to hinge, through to the likes of John Bradshaw, a relatively minor Cheshire lawyer who was appointed lord president of the high court of justice established to try the King - largely because all the more senior judges refused the task. He would become the only Englishman ever to hand down a sentence of death upon his sovereign. Telling a rich and vivid history in matching style, this is a brilliant new take on the most extraordinary decade in English history, and what happened when a conservative people tried revolution.

Book Toulouse Lautrec

    Book Details:
  • Author : Julia Bloch Frey
  • Publisher : Weidenfeld & Nicolson
  • Release : 1994
  • ISBN : 9780297812715
  • Pages : 595 pages

Download or read book Toulouse Lautrec written by Julia Bloch Frey and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 1994 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: