Means to be God, and do as pleases himself Martin Luther observed. It was a shrewd comment, not merely on the divorce in which the King was then embroiled, but upon his whole career. Henry VIII was self righteous, and convinced that he enjoyed a special relationship with the Almighty, which gave him a unique claim upon the obedience of his subjects. He subdued the church, sidelined the old nobility, and reorganised the government of his realm, all in the name of that Good Lordship which wa...

'The authors are to be congratulated on a book which merits usage in the national curriculum.' - International Journal of Nautical ArchaeologyThe raising of the Tudor warship Mary Rose in 1982 has made her one of the most famous ships in history, though there is a good deal more to her story than its terminal disaster. She served successfully in the Royal Navy for more than thirty years before sinking, for reasons still uncertain, during ...

The Tudor Navy is a subject which is very unevenly known. The last significant general histories were written at the end of the last century. Since then much detailed research has been undertaken, particularly on the Armada, the end of Henry VIII's reign and the early Elizabethan period. As a result, it has been generally thought that the navy went through a series of booms and slumps during the sixteenth century. Further research on the intervening periods now presents a much more even pi...

Henry’s fifth queen is best known to history as the stupid adolescent who got herself fatally entangled with lovers and ended up on the block. However, there was more to her than that. She was a symptom of the power struggle that was going on in the court in 1539–40 between Thomas Cromwell and his conservative rivals, among whom the Howard family figured prominently. The Howards were an ambitious clan, and Catherine’s marriage to Henry appeared to signify their triumph. However, her weakne...

The story of Henry VIII and his six wives has passed from history into legend – taught in the cradle as a cautionary tale and remembered in adulthood as an object lesson in the dangers of marrying into royalty. The true story behind the legend, however, remains obscure to most people, whose knowledge of the affair begins and ends with the aide memoire ‘Divorced, executed, died, divorced, executed, survived’. David Loades’ masterly book recounts Henry’s whole sorry tale in detail from his f...

Is neoclassical economics dead? Why have the biggest industrial economies stagnated since the financial crisis? Is the competitive threat from China a tired metaphor or a genuine danger to our standard of living?Lord David Sainsbury draws on his experience in business and government to assemble the evidence and comes to some startling conclusions. In Windows of Opportunity, he argues that economic growth comes not as a steady process, but as a series of jumps, based on inv...

Hybrid cars, fast trains, energy-efficient light bulbs, solar panels, carbon offsets... Forget everything you ever thought you knew about living green.

How much do you know about North Korea? Depending on whom you ask, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) is an international laughing-stock, a terrifying nuclear-powered war machine, or a humanitarian crisis of nightmarish proportion. For David Alton, the DPRK is Asia's tragic and prodigal son, long overdue 'coming in from the cold' and returning to the embrace of the international community. The obstacles are gigantic and the record of human suffering is almost beyond descripti...

Benedict Rogers, born in London, England, first went to China at age eighteen to teach English for six months in Qingdao, three years after the Tiananmen Square massacre. That opened the door to a thirty-year adventure with China, from teaching English in schools and hospitals to working as a journalist in Hong Kong for the first five years after the handover to travelling to China’s borders with Myanmar/Burma and North Korea to document the plight of refugees escaping from Beijing-backed ...

`My object is to have you fit to live; which, if you are not, I do not desire that you should live at all.' So wrote Lord Chesterfield in one of the most celebrated and controversial correspondences between a father and son. Chesterfield wrote almost daily to his natural son, Philip, from 1737 onwards, providing him with instruction in etiquette and the worldly arts. Praised in their day as a complete manual of education, and despised by Samuel Johnson for teaching `the morals of a whore a...

In the early nineteenth century, Henry Maudslay, an engineer from a humble background, opened a factory in Westminster Bridge Road, Lambeth, a stone’s throw from the Thames. Maudslay invented precision engineering, which made the industrial revolution possible, helping Great Britain become the workshop of the world.He developed mass production, interchangeable components, and built the world’s first all-metal machine tools, which quite literally shaped the modern world. Without his...

In the early nineteenth century, Henry Maudslay, an engineer from a humble background, opened a factory in Westminster Bridge Road, a stone’s throw from the Thames. His workshop became in its day the equivalent of Google and Apple combined, attracting the country’s best in engineering talent. Their story of innovation and ambition tells how precision engineering made the industrial revolution possible, helping Great Britain become the workshop of the world.