This was the England of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Bacon; the era of the Gunpowder Plot and the worst outbreak of the plague. Jacobean England was both more godly and less godly than the country had ever been, and the entire culture was drawn taut between these polarities. This was the world that created the King James Bible. It is the greatest work of English prose ever written, and it is no coincidence that the translation was made at the moment "Englishness," specifically the English language itself, had come into its first passionate maturity. The English of Jacobean England has a more encompassing idea of its own scope than any form of the language before or since. It drips with potency and sensitivity. The age, with all its conflicts, explains the book.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

    The famous Journal he kept during the next nine months is an intimate account of his encounters with the high-life and the low-life in London. Frank and confessional as a personal portrait of the young Boswell, the Journal is also revealing as a vivid portrayal of life in eighteenth-century London. This new edition includes an introduction by Peter Ackroyd, which discusses Boswell’s life and achievement.“Boswell was the most charming companion in the world, and London becomes his dining-room and his playground, his club and his confessional. No celebrant of the London world can ignore his book.”—Peter Ackroyd, from the introduction. “Boswell was the most charming companion in the world, and London becomes his dining-room and his playground, his club and his confessional. No celebrant of the London world can ignore his book.”—Peter Ackroyd, from the Introduction. Praise for the earlier edition:"[The journal is] more perceptive and uninhibited and magically alive than one could have hoped. . . . Boswell transforms the most trifling occurrences into adventures, and imparts to the reader his own surpassing lust for experience and his keen sense of the fascination of life."—Austin Wright, Virginia Quarterly Review  "The journal is admirably edited and annotated.”—W. H. Auden, New Yorker  The late Frederick Pottle, Sterling Professor of English Emeritus at Yale University, was editor, bibliographer, and biographer of James Boswell. Peter Ackroyd is the author of London: The Biography, The Life of Thomas More, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, and many other books.

    In this monumental study, acclaimed historian Frank Trentmann unfolds the extraordinary history that has shaped our material world, from late Ming China, Renaissance Italy and the British empire to the present. Astonishingly wide-ranging and richly detailed, Empire of Things explores how we have come to live with so much more, how this changed the course of history, and the global challenges we face as a result.

    It was the world's first creative 'Bohemia'. The nation's most significant artists, actors, poets, novelists, and dramatists lived here. From Soho and Leicester Square across Covent Garden's Piazza to Drury Lane, and down from Long Acre to the Strand, they rubbed shoulders with rakes, prostitutes, market people, craftsmen, and shopkeepers. It was an often brutal world full of criminality, poverty and feuds, but also of high spirits, and an intimacy that was as culturally creative as any other in history. Virtually everything that we associate with Georgian culture was produced here.

    History Bk Club.

    But how many of us can place that event in the context of the entire dramatic year in which it took place? From the death of Edward the Confessor in early January to the Christmas coronation of Duke William of Normandy, there is an almost uncanny symmetry, as well as a relentlessly exciting surge, of events leading to and from Hastings.

    In early 1787, twelve men - a printer, a lawyer, a clergyman, and others united by their hatred of slavery - came together in a London printing shop and began the world's first grass-roots movement, battling for the rights of people on another continent. Masterfully stoking public opinion, the movement's leaders pioneered a variety of techniques that have been adopted by citizens' movements ever since, from consumer boycotts to wall posters and lapel buttons to celebrity endorsements. A deft chronicle of this groundbreaking antislavery crusade and its powerful enemies, Bury the Chains gives a little-celebrated human rights watershed its due at last.

    This imaginary Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is built into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty. Measured against such mythical standards, capitalist transition in the third world has often seemed either incomplete or lacking. Provincializing Europe proposes that every case of transition to capitalism is a case of translation as well--a translation of existing worlds and their thought--categories into the categories and self-understandings of capitalist modernity. Now featuring a new preface in which Chakrabarty responds to his critics, this book globalizes European thought by exploring how it may be renewed both for and from the margins.

    Clashing personalities have joined in unholy matrimony to form such infamous couples as Russia’s Peter II and Catherine the Great, and France's Henri II and Catherine de Medici—all with the purpose of begetting a male heir. But with tensions high and silverware flying, kings like England’s Henry II have fled to the beds of their nubile mistresses, while queens such as Eleanor of Aquitaine have plotted their revenge...Full of the juicy gossip and bad behavior that characterized Royal Affairs, this book chronicles the love-hate marriages of the crowned heads of Europe—from the Angevins to Meghan Markle and Prince Harry—and ponders how dynasties ever survived at all.

    This is a page-turning, revisionist history of the villainised and misunderstood Mary Tudor, the first queen of England.

    Arnold seeks to find out what culture really is, what good it can do, and if it is really necessary. He contrasts culture, which he calls the study of perfection, with anarchy, the mood of unrest and uncertainty that pervaded mid-Victorian England. This edition reproduces the original book version, revealing the immediate historical context and controversy of the piece. The introduction and notes broaden out the interpretative approach to Arnold's text, elaborating on the complexities of the religious context. The book also reinforces the continued importance of Arnold's ideas its influences in the face of the challenges of multi-culturalism and post-modernism.

    More than two centuries have passed since Fletcher Christian mutinied against Lt. Bligh on a small armed transport vessel called Bounty. Why the details of this obscure adventure at the end of the world remain vivid and enthralling is as intriguing as the truth behind the legend. Caroline Alexander focusses on the court martial of the ten mutineers captured in Tahiti and brought to justice in Portsmouth. Each figure emerges as a richly drawn character caught up in a drama that may well end on the gallows. With enormous scholarship and exquisitely drawn characters, The Bounty is a tour de force.

    Browning explores the often-changing war aims of the major belligerents-Austria, France, Great Britain, Prussia, Piedmont-Sardinia, and Spain-and links diplomatic and military events to the political and social context from which they arose.

    The major topics of the day: terrorism, globalization, immigration, consumerism, the collapse of moral values, and the rivalry of superpowers. The twentieth century was not born in the trenches of the Somme or Passchendaele—but rather in the fifteen vertiginous years preceding World War I.In this short span of time, a new world order was emerging in ultimately tragic contradiction to the old. These were the years in which the political and personal repercussions of the Industrial Revolution were felt worldwide: Cities grew like never before as people fled the countryside and their traditional identities; science created new possibilities as well as nightmares; education changed the outlook of millions of people; mass-produced items transformed daily life; industrial laborers demanded a share of political power; and women sought to change their place in society—as well as the very fabric of sexual relations.From the tremendous hope for a new century embodied in the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris to the shattering assassination of a Habsburg archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, historian Philipp Blom chronicles this extraordinary epoch year by year. Prime Ministers and peasants, anarchists and actresses, scientists and psychopaths intermingle on the stage of a new century in this portrait of an opulent, unstable age on the brink of disaster.Beautifully written and replete with deftly told anecdotes, The Vertigo Years brings the wonders, horrors, and fears of the early twentieth century vividly to life.

    The English Civil War would set family against family, friend against friend, and its casualties were immense—a greater proportion of the population than in World War I. England had become a failed state.At the head of the disintegrating kingdom was the figure of the king: Charles I. In this vivid portrait—newly informed by previously unseen manuscripts, including royal correspondence between the king and his queen, some of it written in code—Leanda de Lisle depicts a man who was not cruel enough for his cruel times. He would not persecute his opponents in the bloody style of his Tudor antecedents, or throw his servants to the wolves to save his own skin in the time-honored royal style. He was tutored by his father in the rights and obligations of kings, but had none of his father's political subtlety and experience in survival. In a court of remarkable women he was happily married—but to a French Catholic princess, which caused consternation to his protestant subjects. Principled and high minded, he would pay a terrible price for the personal honor he so valued, and for having enemies more ruthless than he was. Nothing, however, would reflect on his character as much as the scene at his terrible death, speaking on the scaffold as a “martyr of the people.”In his own destruction Charles did not sow the seeds of the monarchy's destruction but its rebirth. England's revolution lasted eleven unhappy years and the Crown was then restored, to national rejoicing. Today England enjoys rule by parliament and monarch while the Church of England has the bishops Charles was determined to preserve. More radical religious experimenters took their faith to the New World and the seeds of a republic, leaving England to mend its wounds and restore its fortunes and future as the world's preeminent constitutional monarchy.