In Jane Austen, Shields follows this superb and beloved novelist from her early family life in Steventown to her later years in Bath, her broken engagement, and her intense relationship with her sister Cassandra. She reveals both the very private woman and the acclaimed author behind the enduring classics Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. With its fascinating insights into the writing process from an award–winning novelist, Carol Shields’s magnificent biography of Jane Austen is also a compelling meditation on how great fiction is created.

    It shows how the deaths of two comrades compelled Tolkien to pursue the dream they had shared, and argues that Tolkien transformed the cataclysm of his generation while many of his contemporaries surrendered to disillusionment. The fruit of five years of meticulous research, this is the first substantially new biography of Tolkien since 1977, distilled from his personal wartime papers and a multitude of other sources.

    The worlds of Milan and Rome through which Caravaggio moved and which Andrew Graham-Dixon describes brilliantly in this book, are those of cardinals and prostitutes, prayer and violence. Graham-Dixon puts the murder of a pimp, Ranuccio Tomassoni, at the centre of his story. It occurred at the height of Caravaggio’s fame in Rome and probably brought about his flight through Malta and Sicily, which led to his death in suspicious circumstances off the coast of Naples. Graham-Dixon shows how Caravaggio’s paintings emerged from this extraordinarily wild and troubled life: his detailed readings of them explain their originality and Caravaggio’s mentality better than any of his predecessors.

    Through the tight lens of four months, Juliet Nicolson’s rich storytelling gifts rivet us with the sights, colors, and feelings of a bygone era. That summer of 1911 a new king was crowned and the aristocracy was at play, bounding from one house party to the next. But perfection was not for all. Cracks in the social fabric were showing. The country was brought to a standstill by industrial strikes. Temperatures rose steadily to more than 100 degrees; by August deaths from heatstroke were too many for newspapers to report. Drawing on material from intimate and rarely seen sources and narrated through the eyes of a series of exceptional individuals — among them a debutante, a choirboy, a politician, a trade unionist, a butler, and the Queen — The Perfect Summer is a vividly rendered glimpse of the twilight of the Edwardian era.

    At its heart is one of the world's greatest love stories: the lifelong devotion of King Henri II of France to Diane de Poitiers, a beautiful aristocrat who was nineteen years older than her lover.At age fourteen, Henri was married to fourteen-year-old Catherine de' Medici, an unattractive but extremely wealthy heiress who was to bring half of Italy to France as her dowry. When Catherine met Henri on her wedding day, she fell instantly in love, but Henri could see no one but the beautiful Diane. When Henri eventually became king, he and Diane ruled France as one. Meanwhile, Catherine took as her secret motto the words "Hate and Wait" and lived for the day Diane would die and she could win Henri's love and rule by his side. Fate had another plan.Her Royal Highness Princess Michael of Kent, herself a descendant of both Catherine and Diane, imbues this seldom-told story with an insider's grasp of royal life. The Serpent and the Moon is a fascinating love story as well as a richly woven history of an extraordinary time.

    The era was one of unprecedented authoritarianism: England, it seemed, had become a police state, fearful of threats from abroad and plotters at home. This age of terror was also the era of the greatest creative genius the world has ever known: William Shakespeare. How, then, could such a remarkable man born into such violently volatile times apparently make no comment about the state of England in his work? He did. But it was hidden. Revealing Shakespeare's sophisticated version of a forgotten code developed by 16th-century dissidents, Clare Asquith shows how he was both a genius for all time and utterly a creature of his own era: a writer who was supported by dissident Catholic aristocrats, who agonized about the fate of England's spiritual and political life and who used the stage to attack and expose a regime which he believed had seized illegal control of the country he loved.Shakespeare's plays offer an acute insight into the politics and personalities of his era. And Clare Asquith's decoding of them offers answers to several mysteries surrounding Shakespeare's own life, including most notably why he stopped writing while still at the height of his powers. An utterly compelling combination of literary detection and political revelation, Shadowplay is the definitive expose of how Shakespeare lived through and understood the agonies of his time, and what he had to say about them.

    Born in the year of the great English victory at Agincourt, she lived long enough to witness the arrival of the future Henry VIII. Her marriage to Richard, Duke of York, was successful, even happy, and she travelled with him wherever his career dictated, bearing his children in England, Ireland and France, including the future Edward IV and Richard III. What was the substance behind her claim to be 'queen by right'? Would she indeed have made a good queen during these turbulent times? One of a huge family herself, Cecily would see two of her sons become kings of England but the struggles that tore apart the Houses of Lancaster and York also turned brother against brother. Cecily's life cannot have been easy. Images of her dripping in jewels and holding her own alternative 'court' might belie the terrible heartache of seeing her descendants destroy each other. In attempting to be the family peacemaker, she frequently had to make heart-wrenching choices, yet these did not destroy her. She battled on, outliving her husband, friends, rivals and most of her children, to become one of the era's great survivors.

    Quite the tragic love story, right?Wrong.In this electrifying exposé, Hayley Nolan explores for the first time the full, uncensored evidence of Anne Boleyn’s life and relationship with Henry VIII, revealing the shocking suppression of a powerful woman.So leave all notions of outdated and romanticised folklore at the door and forget what you think you know about one of the Tudors’ most notorious queens. She may have been silenced for centuries, but this urgent book ensures Anne Boleyn’s voice is being heard now.#TheTruthWillOut

    The Regency (1811–1820) began when the profligate Prince of Wales—the future king George IV—replaced his insane father, George III, as Britain’s ruler.Around the regent surged a society steeped in contrasts: evangelicalism and hedonism, elegance and brutality, exuberance and despair. The arts flourished at this time with a showcase of extraordinary writers and painters such as Jane Austen, Lord Byron, the Shelleys, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner. Science burgeoned during this decade, too, giving us the steam locomotive and the blueprint for the modern computer.Yet the dark side of the era was visible in poverty, slavery, pornography, opium, and the gothic imaginings that birthed the novel Frankenstein. With the British military in foreign lands, fighting the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the War of 1812 in the United States, the desire for empire and an expanding colonial enterprise gained unstoppable momentum. Exploring these crosscurrents, Robert Morrison illuminates the profound ways this period shaped and indelibly marked the modern world.

    Bradley put Shakespeare on the map for generations of readers and students for whom the plays might not otherwise have become 'real' at all" writes John Bayley in his foreword to this edition of Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth.Approaching the tragedies as drama, wondering about their characters as he might have wondered about people in novels or in life, Bradley is one of the most liberating in the line of distinguished Shakespeare critics. His acute yet undogmatic and almost conversational critical method has—despite fluctuations in fashion—remained enduringly popular and influential. For, as John Bayley observes, these lectures give us a true and exhilarating sense of "the tragedies joining up with life, with all our lives; leading us into a perspective of possibilities that stretch forward and back in time, and in our total awareness of things."

    It will be a brave, not to say foolhardy, author who attempts to write another life of Churchill for at least a decade, perhaps longer."--Andrew Roberts, Sunday Telegraph Roy Jenkins combines unparalleled command of British political history and his own high-level government experience in a narrative account of Churchill's astounding career that is unmatched in its shrewd insights, its unforgettable anecdotes, the clarity of its overarching themes, and the author's nuanced appreciation of his extraordinary subject.Exceptional in its breadth of knowledge and distinguished in its stylish wit and penetrating intelligence, Churchill is one of the finest political biographies of our time.

    This text claims that the link between William Shakespeare and the works published under his name is weak, and it argues instead that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford and a literary Elizabethan courtier, is a far more plausible author than Shakespeare, the obscure country actor.

    England loved her; Henry loved, respected, and finally feared her. Wolsey hated her. Twice she saved England, once from invasion, once from Civil War. Here is one of those rare books, brilliantly readable and buttressed by scholarship and research, which make you see history through new eyes.

    To everyone's great surprise, this playboy prince sobered up and became an extremely effective leader and the founder of England's modern monarchy. For readers of Sally Bedell Smith's Elizabeth the Queen and Robert K. Massie's Catherine the Great."This is not only the best biography of King Edward VII; it's also one of the best books about royalty ever published." So began the London Independent's review of this wonderfully entertaining biography of Britain's playboy king-a Prince Charles of the Victorian age, only a lot more fun-who waited for nearly six decades to get his chance to rule. A notorious gambler, glutton and womanizer (he was dubbed "Edward the Caresser"), the world was his oyster as this aging Prince of Wales took advantage of his royal entitlements to travel, hunt, socialize, over-indulge-he smoked a dozen cigars a day-and bed a string of mistresses and married women in addition to his own wife. His mother Queen Victoria despaired: "Bertie, I grieve to say, shows more and more how totally, totally unfit he is for ever becoming king." And yet by the time he died in 1910, after only nine years on the throne, he had proven to be a hard working, effective king and an ace diplomat, at home and abroad.A bestseller in the UK, this "exhaustively researched, richly colorful and wittily observed biography" (the London Sunday Times) is a tremendously entertaining read for history buffs and royal watchers.

    But in Great Britain, it is the real football. No pads, no prayers, no prisoners. And that's before the players even take the field.Nick Hornby has been a football fan since the moment he was conceived. Call it predestiny. Or call it preschool. Fever Pitch is his tribute to a lifelong obsession. Part autobiography, part comedy, part incisive analysis of insanity, Hornby's award-winning memoir captures the fever pitch of fandom — its agony and ecstasy, its community, its defining role in thousands of young mens' coming-of-age stories. Fever Pitch is one for the home team. But above all, it is one for everyone who knows what it really means to have a losing season.