Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1997-01-30
RRP: £8.99
Price: £4.49
Review The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives / Vintage:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2002-10-03
RRP: £10.99
Price: £6.11
Review The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe / Vintage:
Publication date: 2008-09-18
RRP: £8.99
Price: £4.36
Review Henry VIII: King and Court / Vintage:Henry VIII (1491-1547) casts a long shadow over English royalty and biography alike. In Henry VIII: King and Court, Alison Weir takes on this forbidding reputation to produce an admirably detailed, if somewhat cumbersome, biography of a king who married six times and presided over England's cataclysmic split with Roman Catholicism. Weir's main task is to overturn the "caricature" of Henry "as a man who thought of nothing but chasing the ladies, and who threw chicken bones over his shoulder". This seems a rather obvious characterisation to challenge, but Weir proceeds to amass an extraordinary wealth of detail about Henry's cultivated court, from its learning, architecture and political machinations, to how many people handled Henry's bedsheets and the food that his horses ate. The early sections get bogged down in too much detail, and detract from the political drama of Henry's growing estrangement from his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and his fateful marriage to Anne Boleyn in 1532. The second section is much more convincing in tracing how "the young, idealist humanist with liberal ideas about kingship was giving way to a selfish, dogmatic tyrant", as Henry dispenses with Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, Anne and then Cromwell, and the court increasingly sinks into factionalism and intrigue. Weir's biography is a lively recreation of the everyday life of Henry, his court and what he called his "ill-conditioned wives", but it neglects the wider European dimensions of Henry's reign, and sweeps over many crucial aspects of the split with Rome. Detailed and scholarly, Henry VIII: King and Court provides a strangely colourless portrait of the most colourful of English monarchs. -Jerry Brotton.
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2006-03-02
Dewey code: 941.0840922
RRP: £7.99
Price: £4.14
Review We are at War: The Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times / Ebury Press:
Creator: William Brand
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2001-06-07
Dewey code: 320
RRP: £8.99
Price: £4.06
Review Another Day of Life (Penguin Modern Classics) / Penguin Classics:
Publication date: 2006-05-08
RRP: £7.99
Price: £2.94
Review Night song of the last tram: A Glasgow childhood / Hodder Paperbacks:
Edition: Touchstone Ed
Publication date: 1986-07-01
Dewey code: 813.54
RRP: £9.95
Price: £5.59
Review Fate Is the Hunter / Pocket Books:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2003-11-06
Dewey code: 809
RRP: £12.99
Price: £7.89
Review Byron: Life and Legend / Faber and Faber:
Publication date: 2008-11-11
Dewey code: 973.56092
RRP: £20.50
Price: £13.46
Review American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House / Random House:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2005-08-01
Dewey code: 950.21092
RRP: £9.99
Price: £4.91
Review Genghis Khan: And the Making of the Modern World / Three Rivers Press:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2007-04-05
Dewey code: 382.456234
RRP: £7.99
Price: £2.69
Review As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela: Underground Adventures in the Arms and Torture Trade / Ebury Press:
Publication date: 2002-03-08
Dewey code: 335
RRP: £9.99
Price: £5.84
Review Lenin: A Biography / Pan Books:Few political reputations have collapsed quite as quickly as that of Lenin, the ideological guru of Russian Communism, the hero of the revolution of October 1917, and the first leader of the Soviet Union. Just as the Berlin Wall was pulled to the ground, so were thousands of statues of Lenin toppled across Eastern Europe and the new Russia in the early 1990s. But now that the dust has settled, and the Cold War is over, historians can be more objective about the life and achievements of Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (Lenin was his adopted revolutionary name). Robert Service's book is the first major biography of Lenin for several decades and it benefits from the thaw that has opened up previously inaccessible material, particularly on Lenin's family and his medical history. Born into a wealthy family of landowners, lawyers and government officials, Lenin's revolutionary path was marked out when his elder brother was executed for his part in an assassination plot on the Tsar. From that point on, aided by his sisters, his wife and a loyal but argumentative band of Bolshevik followers, Lenin committed himself to the overthrow of the Tsarist regime, enduring exile, prison and ostracism in the process. This compelling and action-packed book brings Lenin and Leninism to life in a way that no previous account has managed to do. -Miles Taylor.
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2006-05-04
Dewey code: 624.092
RRP: £16.99
Price: £9.85
Review Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel / Hambledon Continuum:
Publication date: 2008-05-05
RRP: £16.99
Price: £7.26
Review Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life / Granta Books:
Publication date: 2007-10-01
RRP: £8.99
Price: £8.99
Review Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War 1941-45 / The History Press:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2003-02-03
Dewey code: 320
RRP: £9.99
Price: £2.98
Review Wellington: The Iron Duke / HarperCollins Publishers Ltd:We associate Wellington so much with the battle of Waterloo that it's easy to forget that, before the battle, he had had a long military career already and that, after it, he had an even longer career as politician, prime minister and pillar of the establishment. Richard Holmes's admirably clear and succinct biography of the Duke has a chapter on his youth as a slightly awkward loner from the Anglo-Irish nobility and a concluding chapter which races swiftly through the 37 years of his post-Waterloo life. However the bulk of the book, unsurprisingly, is given over to a description and analysis of his military exploits. As viewers of his TV series and readers of his previous books will know, Holmes is a brilliant interpreter of battlefields and what took place on them. He has visited most of the sites of Wellington's battles, not only those in Europe but those in India where the young Arthur Wellesley, as he then was, gained his first experiences as a general. (Wellington himself, in later life, claimed that his finest military achievement was not Waterloo but the winning of the Battle of Assaye during the Maratha Wars in 1803. ) He uses his knowledge of the battle sites and his familiarity with all the extensive literature on the Peninsular War and Waterloo to produce a vivid account of Wellington's string of successes as a general. As the quotes in this book from his writings and despatches show, Wellington had a gift for the striking phrase and for concise description of complicated events. It's a gift his biographer shares and Holmes has produced a very readable and enjoyable book. -Nick Rennison.
Publication date: 2008-11-01
RRP: £30.00
Price: £13.50
Review Journals 1952-2000 / Atlantic Books:
Publication date: 2008-08-28
RRP: £25.00
Price: £14.44
Review Ettie: The Intimate Life And Dauntless Spirit Of Lady Desborough / Weidenfeld & Nicolson:
Authors
- Ewen Southby-Tailyour
- Andre Hue
Publication date: 2005-03-31
Dewey code: 940.548644092
RRP: £8.99
Price: £4.49
Review The Next Moon: The Remarkable True Story of a British Agent behind the Lines in Wartime France / Penguin:
Edition: Definitive Ed
Publication date: 1997-02-06
Dewey code: 940
RRP: £20.00
Price: £13.51
Review The Diary of a Young Girl: Definitive Edition / Viking:
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The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, Henry VIII: King and Court, We are at War: The Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times, Another Day of Life (Penguin Modern Classics), Night song of the last tram: A Glasgow childhood, Fate Is the Hunter, Byron: Life and Legend, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Genghis Khan: And the Making of the Modern World, As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela: Underground Adventures in the Arms and Torture Trade, Lenin: A Biography, Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life, Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War 1941-45, Wellington: The Iron Duke, Journals 1952-2000, Ettie: The Intimate Life And Dauntless Spirit Of Lady Desborough, The Next Moon: The Remarkable True Story of a British Agent behind the Lines in Wartime France, The Diary of a Young Girl: Definitive Edition |
