A modern biography of Samuel Johnson that will serve as the definitive work on the legendary British man of lettersIn this groundbreaking portrait of Samuel Johnson, David Nokes positions the great thinker in his rightful place as an active force in the Enlightenment, not a mere recorder or performer, and demonstrates how his interaction with life impacted his work. This is the story of how Johnson struggled to define the English language, why he embarked upon such ...

Richard III is accused of murdering his nephews (the 'Princes in the Tower') in order to usurp the throne of England. Since Tudor times he has been painted as the 'black legend,' the murderous uncle. However, the truth is much more complicated and interesting. Rather than looking at all the killings Richard III did not commit, this book focuses on the one execution for which we know that he was responsible.On Friday 13 June 1483, William, Lord Hastings was hustled ...

Eavesdropping on Jane Austen's England explores the real England of Jane Austen's lifetime. It was a troubled period, with disturbing changes in industry and agriculture and a constant dread of invasion and revolution. The comfortable, tranquil country of her fiction is a complete contrast to the England in which she actually lived. From forced marriages and the sale of wives in marketplaces to boys and girls working down mines or as chimney sweeps, this enthralling social history...

Antonia Fraser's bestselling account of the lives of women in seventeenth-century England.Just how weak were the women of the Civil War era? What could they expect beyond marriage and childbirth in an age where infant and maternal mortality was frequent and contraception unknown? Did anyone marry for love? Could a woman divorce? What rights had the unmarried? What expectations the widows?An expert on the period, Antonia Fraser brings to life the many and va...

Adam Nicolson tells the story of England through the history of fourteen gentry families – from the 15th century to the present day. This sparkling work of history reads like a real-life Downton Abbey, as the loves, hatreds and many times of grief of his chosen cast illuminate the grand events of history.We may well be ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, but for generations England was a country dominated by its middling families, rooted on their land, in their locality, with a healthy inte...

Did Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the Princes on the Tower, survive his imprisonment? In this revealing new book medieval historian David Baldwin presents an original and intriguing scenario.On 27 December 1550 an old man named Richard Plantagenet was buried at Eastwell in Kent. He had spent much of his life working as a bricklayer at St John's Abbey, Colchester, but, unusually for a bricklayer, he could read Latin. Reluctant to give any account of his back...

(This ebook does not include illustrations.)This social history records the daily life of the English people from the time of the Norman Conquest to our own.Based on diaries, letters, memoirs, official reports, the works of modern social historians and the literature of every period, it traces the development of English society over 900 years.The chapters range over life in the castles, palaces and monasteries, in the homes of rich merchants and in the hovels of pea...

William Hogarth is a house-hold name across the country, his prints hang in our pubs and leap out from our history-books. He painted the great and good but also the common people. His art is comically exuberant, 'carried away by a passion for the ridiculous', as Hazlitt said.Jenny Uglow, acclaimed author of Elizabeth Gaskell, Nature's Engraver and In These Times, uncovers the man, but also the world he sprang from and the lives he pictured. He moved in th...

At a time when there were almost no career openings for women a group of intrepid and gifted females scaled the heights of what was literally a man's world - they became bawds. Mother Clap - women bawds were often known as Mother - ran male brothels, or Molly Houses. Elizabeth Holland had an immense moated mansion built on Bankside and for thirty years entertained the aristocracy, including royalty. When troops attempted to stop her trade and eject her from the house, she ...

'Fascinating scholarship. Todd conveys Behn's vivacious character and the mores of the time' New York Times'All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn; for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds,' said Virginia Woolf. Yet that tomb, in Westminster Abbey, records one of the few uncontested facts about this Restoration playwright, poet of the erotic and bisexual, political propagandist, novelist and spy: the date of her death,...

An fascinating account of witch trials in 1634 where over 60 local people were arrested in the area of Pendle Forest (East Lancashire - Northern England). These unfortunates were tried for their lives on the evidence of a ten year-old boy who became famous as the 'Pendle Witch-finder.'This case became nationally famous when King Charles the First took a personal interest. Playwrights wrote and performed plays in London and these were widely acclaimed.The 1634 trials followe...

Elizabeth I is perhaps England's most famous monarch. Born in 1533, the product of the doomed marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth was heir to her father's title, then disinherited and finally imprisoned her half sister Mary. Her childhood was one of fear and danger, she was aware from the outset that the eyes of the world were upon her and that to survive she would have to rely on her own judgement and strength of character. Many tried to use her for their ow...